[Pkg-utopia-maintainers] Bug#414569: Confusion

[Andrew Bortz]

Mike's solution of changing the hosts line of /etc/nsswitch.conf to read:

  hosts: files mdns4_minimal [NOTFOUND=return] dns [NOTFOUND=return] mdns4

is exactly what I've been doing on all Avahi-enabled Linux machines
for some time now, and Debian should really pick up this patch, or
some variant. It does not solve the unicast .local lookups problem
that others are having, but since that is now relatively rare,
deprecated behavior, it should probably be solved as a configuration
switch in a different patch.

This patch _does_ solve the very common situation of long timeouts
attempting a reverse lookup on an IP address that does not have a
reverse record (any IP, not just local ones), without breaking lookups
for computers without any unicast DNS resolver (e.g. avahi-autoipd).
This patch will break multicast reverse lookups for IPs outside
169.254/16, but since those are a "bad idea" anyway, this is a
no-brainer IMO.

Sorry that I'm not familiar with the Debian dev process, but is there
someone currently assigned to this bug? The patch must be close to a
1-liner, so I can contribute it if necessary.

- Andrew