Situation of tftpd-hpa

[Stéphane Graber]

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Hello everyone,

Recently, tftpd-hpa got synced with Debian. We used to carry the 0.x
serie in the past and since Lucid we now have 5.x.

 tftpd-hpa |     0.49-1 |        karmic | amd64, i386
 tftpd-hpa |     5.0-11 |         lucid | amd64, i386

That sync made quite a lot of changes in the way tftpd-hpa behaves:
 - Instead of using /var/lib/tftpboot, it now uses /srv/tftp
 - The path is prompted with a priority HIGH debconf question
 - Instead of using inetd by default, it now runs as a daemon.

All these changes affect LTSP quite a lot as we are quite used to having
everything handled by inetd (openbsd-inetd) and have our scripts write
in /var/lib/tftpboot/ and not /srv/tftp.
That priority high question also means that anyone installing LTSP at
the moment has to confirm or change the TFTP path.

https://bugs.edge.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/ltsp/+bug/518815

I'm not sure I understand why all the changed in Debian, especially as
it's very likely to break a lot of scripts and confuse a lot of users.

I would be interested to hear if someone has a good reason to want that
quite important change happen in Lucid with all the work potentially
involved to update LTSP and other scripts using tftpd-hpa or if we
should rather restore the previous behavior and wait for Lucid+1 to
change it.

As far as LTSP is concerned, I guess I can quite easily fix the issue by:
 - Updating ltsp.seed to preseed that debconf question
 - Update the code to use /srv/tftp
 - Make sure we don't update the inetd record

But I'm also worried about other projects/scripts using that tftp server.

- --
Stéphane Graber
Ubuntu developer
http://www.ubuntu.com
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