Subject: bug#66306: Too many services depend on ‘networking’

From: Ludovic Courtès <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 02 Oct 2023 14:24:49 +0200

I believe too many services depend on ‘networking’ for no good reason.
There’s a good discussion of the problem at:

  https://systemd.io/NETWORK_ONLINE/

For example, bitlbee, ntpd, hurd-vm, and avahi-daemon all depend on
‘networking’.

Is it always justified?  For example, avahi-daemon unconditionally
listens on 0.0.0.0 and [::], so there’s no need to depend on
‘networking’.

--8<---------------cut here---------------start------------->8---
$ sudo netstat -tupla |grep avahi
udp        0      0 0.0.0.0:mdns            0.0.0.0:*                           650/avahi-daemon: r 
udp6       0      0 [::]:mdns               [::]:*                              650/avahi-daemon: r 
--8<---------------cut here---------------end--------------->8---

In other cases, such as bitlbee, it’s not as obvious because users can
specify different addresses to listen to, and those might depend on
‘networking’ to set up the corresponding interfaces.

Thoughts?  Should we do an audit of these?

Ludo’.