Comment 52 for bug 10239

On Mon, Feb 18, 2008 at 04:01:40PM +0100, Olaf van der Spek wrote:
> Andrew Pollock wrote:
> >As I've said previously, I'd rather not make the downstream DHCP package
> >deviate significantly in behaviour from the upstream software. I don't
> >particularly like having magical strings that are interpretted differently
> >to literal strings. I'd rather see it be a directive than a magical string
> >that gets special treatment. According to upstream, their config parser
> >can't cope with that concept though.
> >
> >>And what are other distributions doing?
> >
> >Not sure, I haven't looked. Why don't you and let me know?
> >
> >I suggest you lobby upstream to implement the functionality, as I have
> >been.
> >
> >http://marc.info/?l=dhcp-users&m=120027890132057&w=4
>
> Upstream appears to prefer a solution that accepts the pipe output of
> applications for values in the conf file.
> Such a solution doesn't exist yet, so I think it's best to apply the
> Ubuntu patch until there's a better solution.
>

And then what? We have a behaviour change to deal with? This is one of the
reasons why I don't like making distribution packages differ in behaviour
and functionality from upstream.

As it happens, I had lunch with a bunch of the DHCP folks from ISC
yesterday. I discussed this particular feature with them (again). They have
feature releases and point releases. The only way this will get into
upstream is in another feature release.

regards

Andrew