[Bug 510591] Re: avahi-browse makes host completion ugly and slow

[MestreLion]

Too bad the patch entirely removed avahi-browser , instead of using
upstream techniques (strict timeout, silent subshell, etc) to make it
work properly (or minize the issues). Now ssh tab completion is
*useless*, since ~/.ssh/known_hosts is hashed and /etc/hosts is usually
empty.  avahi-brower was the only source of useful lists.

It also affects all other tab completions that rely on
_known_hosts_real(), like ping. They are all useless now.

It should at least have made it optional. Lazy lazy patch...

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/510591

Title:
  avahi-browse makes host completion ugly and slow

Status in “bash-completion” package in Ubuntu:
  Fix Released
Status in “bash-completion” package in Debian:
  Confirmed

Bug description:
  Binary package hint: bash-completion

  The latest version of bash-completion, synced into lucid, calls the
  following from /etc/bash-completion in _known_hosts_real():

  avahi-browse -cpr _workstation._tcp

  which is probably great on a small home network with 2 machines.
  However, there are typically over 100 Avahi/Bonjour devices on the
  same broadcast network as my laptop, and because they are generally
  laptops they are appearing and disappearing on the network very
  frequently, which means avahi will often hit its internal timeouts
  when trying to resolve things that are going away. This adds up to the
  above avahi-browse command always taking at least 5 seconds, which is
  really quite a lot of time to add to a tab completion.

  Secondly, something is wrong with the way it is being called, as the
  first thing it always prints, to stderr, is:

  WARNING: Unhandled message:
  interface=org.freedesktop.DBus.Introspectable, path=/,
  member=Introspect

  (stderr is not redirected away by the bash-completion script).
  Depending on how many hosts have timed out, I will then get for each
  one, an error like:

  Failed to resolve service 'bob-laptop [00:11:22:33:44:55]' of type
  '_workstation._tcp' in domain 'local': Timeout reached

  All in all this makes for a very unpleasant experience if you are a
  sysadmin who uses ssh constantly!

  avahi is a great feature, but please make this silent and optional for
  those of us whom it hurts!

  ProblemType: Bug
  Architecture: amd64
  Date: Thu Jan 21 11:12:20 2010
  DistroRelease: Ubuntu 10.04
  EcryptfsInUse: Yes
  InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 9.10 "Karmic Koala" - Release Candidate amd64 (20091020.3)
  Package: bash-completion 1:1.1-3
  PackageArchitecture: all
  ProcEnviron:
   PATH=(custom, user)
   LANG=en_GB.utf8
   SHELL=/bin/bash
  ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 2.6.32-11.15-generic
  SourcePackage: bash-completion
  Uname: Linux 2.6.32-11-generic x86_64

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