The Internet Systems Consortium has stopped maintaining their DHCP client, which is standard on a lot of distros.
Debian has updated its documentation and now warns users to choose an alternative:
https://packages.debian.org/bookworm/isc-dhcp-client
On Debian Unstable, I was already forced to uninstall it in yesterday’s upgrade.
If you’re using network-manager, you don’t need to worry, since it includes its own dhcp client, but for others, this might be relevant.
On Arch, this concerns the dhcpd package:
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Dhcpd
The Arch wiki article already states it’s unmaintained since January 2023. So Arch users have had almost a year to find another solution at this point.
I posted mainly because Debian now seems to force a switch in Unstable and many distros rely on its packages.
On Arch, the client is in the
dhclient
package, which is generally also the name of the ISC DHCP client binary.dhcpcd
(DHCP Client Daemon) is not affiliated with the ISC and still appears to be under active development.I mentioned dhcpd (the ISC DHCP server demon), not dhcpcd, the unaffiliated DHCP Client demon.
Yes; I wanted to mention that dhcpcd is not affected because the title explicitly mentions the DHCP client (dhclient), so people might go looking for alternative DHCP clients in the comments.
I think it’s a bit confusing that you mentioned the DHCP client (dhclient) and DHCP relay (dhrelay) in the title, then link to the Arch Wiki article about the DHCP server (dhcpd). Yes, dhrelay is contained in the dhcpd package (dhclient, however, is not), but I assume most people will be using a DHCP client and few will be operating a DHCP server or relay.
If you’re using network-manager, you don’t need to worry, since it includes its own dhcp client, but for others, this might be relevant.
So… every GNOME and KDE Distro is unaffected? Other Desktops too?
Neither GNOME nor Plasma depend on NetworkManager, do they? Plasma will happily show information about connections managed by something else than NetworkManager, but won’t be able to manage them itself. But desktop distributions will most likely ship it as it covers basically all use cases.
Neither GNOME nor Plasma depend on NetworkManager, do they?
Not directly, but distros may choose to create a dependency.
On Debian, installing recommended dependencies is enabled by default and disabling them can lead to all sorts of errors and missing functionality.
gnome-shell recommends gnome-control-center, which recommends network-manager-gnome, which depends on network-manager.
So unless you go out of your way to install a very minimal system, it gets pulled in.From my point of view, nothing else but NetworkManager makes sense to ship by default for a distribution aimed at desktop use. So I fully understand distributions doing this. My point was rather that this is not related to any particular WM / DE.
I don’t think so. Dhcpcd + wpa_supplicant is really light, suitable for light installers, and live USB stick images.
I’ve been using dhcpcd + wpa_supplicant for so long… I do understand currently users prefer NM, but I hope there’s no push for it to be the unique way to manage network connectivity, and on light installers, I hope I’m not force to use NM either.
I mean traditionally NetworkManager uses wpa_supplicant anyways though there is the option for iwd. So it will stay available for quite some time.
Okay thanks. Makes sense that way. But de facto most Distros will ship it.
Other DEs should use network manager as well. I’ve tested this at least on MATE, XFCE, as well as Cinnamon.
This is not a guarantee, tho, as users can pretty much install whatever they want.
Except for parts of it that are broken
This article is from July 2021. Why exactly are you sharing this?
When I updated Debian Unstable 2 days ago, it forced me to uninstall isc-dhcp-client in order to upgrade network-manager.
So I looked up the reason and found the ISC’s blog post. I shared it here thinking it might be interesting to some, since Debian’s packages are the basis for a lot of other distros that might be affected soon.Okay, fair point, so it is relevant for a current issue