On Tue, Feb 22, 2022 at 9:14 PM Noah Meyerhans <no...@debian.org> wrote:
> On Tue, Feb 22, 2022 at 11:22:08AM +0200, Martin-Éric Racine wrote:
> > Given how upstream ISC will stop development of its DHCP suite by the end 
> > of 2022 [1], Debian will need to select a new stock DHCP client to ship 
> > with Priority:Important.
> >
> > dhcpcd5 seems like the most potential replacement. It covers most IPv4 and 
> > IPv6 usage cases, and upstream regularly updates the code. However, the 
> > Debian package hasn't been updated in ages.
>
> We talked a little bit about the future of DHCP clients in #995189,
> though we didn't come up with a definitive plan.  Regardless of what
> happens with dhcpcd5, we do need to move forward with something.  Doing
> nothing (which effectively leaves us with an unsupported dhclient by
> default) is not a good option.
>
> As far as I know, there are no drop-in replacements for dhclient.  Thus,
> the change is going to be pretty significant for dhclient users.  On the
> plus side, we get to use this as an opportunity to figure out what we
> really want to support long-term.

Agreed.

> For desktop systems running NetworkManager, it sounds like we don't need
> a dedicated DHCP client at all; nm has DHCP client support built in and
> uses it by default.

NM has support for a variety of DHCP backends. dhclient and dhcpcd5
are both supported. In #964947, Michael Biebel mentions that enabling
the dhcpcd5 backend has been requested, but cannot proceed until
Debian has a recent enough version in the repository.

> For servers, the ideal situation is somewhat less clear, but there was
> at least some interest in using systemd-networkd (with or without
> netplan).

I would avoid anything systemd or NM specific.

Martin-Éric

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