Thoughts on dhcp-client automatically determining the hostname?

[Olaf van der Spek]

On Feb 11, 2008 10:16 PM, Jeffrey Hutzelman <jhutz at cmu.edu> wrote:
> No; "run a program and collect its output" is consideraby more work than
> just "run a program".  The output-collecting part is a bit tricky to get
> right, especially if you want to handle a program that may fork children
> which never exit (leaving the pipe open).  Programs may produce arbitrary
> output, so you have to be prepared to allocate memory to put it in and/or
> set limits on the amount of output that will be collected.  And so on.

That's true, but it's not like it hasn't been done before. ;)

> >> > It'd still be nice if the host name was send by default though. What
> >> > are the disadvantages of doing that?
> >>
> >> it's essentially a leakage of privacy information, so i'm
> >> uncomfortable with making that decision in the code.  this is the sort
> >> of thing that should be decided in integrating the dhclient into an
> >> OS; who is your user and what do they expect?
> >
> > But some Linux distributions would prefer not to deviate from upstream
> > (too much).
>
> Some things require every integrator to make a decision.  Configuring
> dhclient is one of these cases - the correct configuration depends on how
> the distribution manages network interfaces, which varies widely from one
> distribution to the next.  There is no one-size-fits-all answer.
>
> And, as David points out, if there's going to be an upstream default, it
> should be to preserve privacy whenever possible, rather than giving away as
> much information as possible.

Fair enough. What about the Ubuntu patch then?