I installed FC6 on my computers and am just fine-tuning the configuration when I came across "avahi". I was reading about this service on the avahi-homepage and decided that I do not want this service. Trying to "yum remove avahi" results in 130 packages to be removed due to dependencies, including openoffice, nautilus, pirut, evolution, gedit, ...
This is ridiculous. How can all these software packages depend on a network discovering service that I (and I assume a lot of other Linux users) don't need? Or am I missing something?
I have disabled the avahi service with chkconfig but I did not un-install it. Does anybody know how to remove avahi? Or why all the other packages depend on avahi?

best,
Werner

Disabling the service should be enough, especially if your distro lists it as dependency for other packages. If you are afraid that it could be turned on, you could also add a firewall rule, IIRC avahi uses a special port to cummunicate.

Why do you absolutely want to remove it?

Okay. I don't need to "absolutely" remove it. I guess I am just a bit edgy about pre-installed software. I bought a HP notebook just recently (DV 9000 t) and I was shocked when I booted it. It came with MS XP and a ton of software packages that I did not order nor want to have (actually, I did not want to have XP to begin with, but I had no choice here). The whole software installation takes about 14GB on the disk. If I were a MS XP user, I would be upset about this because it takes hours and hours to remove all these advertisement/trial/useless software packages.

With Linux I could always fairly easily remove packages I don't want. But that seems to be changing and avahi caught my attention.

best,
Werner

It depends on the distro. In Slackware you could probably remove it more easily (if it were there - it isn't) because there is no dependency checking. In Debian I'm sure you can do some magic with a virtual package as a placeholder for the dependencies. I have no doubt there's also some magic possible with rpm as used by Fedora. If you want to have that kind of control, have a closer look at rpm.

What needs to be seen afterwards is if the other software that expects avahi to be available will still work or not. That depends on the way it is written and there's nothing you can do about it directly.

Or maybe you just want a "lighter" distro?

I tried removing it from FC6 and was shocked by how many other packages were dependent on it. I think this is a serious packaging flaw because most of the packages that yum wanted to remove will work fine without avahi, so why its a major dependency for KDE and others is beyond me.

Maybe rpm or yum have something like optional dependencies?

I can understand that they promote avahi. The rendezvous protocol is probably a major step to help new users connect their machines and network-enabled services. It's an Apple thing, it's meant to ease the use of computers for non-techies. Makes sense to me.

That's why I suggested blocking the port (UDP 5353) if you don't want it to work. Still, I'd be interested why both of you want to get rid of it.

I have no use for it and my network works pretty fine without it, so thats why I wanted to remove it. When creating rpms, you list which packages your package depends on and it seems like many depend on the presence of avahi although they can work perfectly fine without it. This is bad packaging in my opinion because on other distros dependencies for avahi are not hard coded into packages such as KDE so it can be removed if its not needed.

If I were to accept blindly any software package and installed it on my system I might as well use MS XP. I use Linux because I want to be able to control the software that I am using. And I don't want anybody else dictating that to me.

I don't need avahi and therefore I don't want it installed on my system. I don't want to be forced to check if it safe, I don't want to be forced to check what resources it is using and I don't want to be forced to check if it conflicts with software I am planning to install.

I don't see any reason why OpenOffice should depend on avahi. I aggree with reddazz; it is more likely to a packaging error.

best,
Werner

Hello,

Looking for way to get rid of Avahi I found out this thread. Sorry to bring it back, but the only way I was able to stop Avahi from breaking my system's network connection was to disable it. System is Fedora 9 with a static ip address that changed to an unknown ip address at every reboot. I was able to ifconfig it back to life but it was broken again at next reboot. Finally disabling Avahi from the service list took care of it.

This is a fixed server with no use for Avahi's roaming enabling functions, so I wanted to get rid of it for good, but since it appears as a dependency to 100+ of applications, I wonder what else might stop working if Avahi is removed (e.g. rpm -e --nodeps avahi).

Thanks,

I removed Avahi-Daemon from my server. and clients but had to reinstall some of those other programs when I used aptitude to remove it....system works fine without it.