Subject: Re: [Linux-decnet-user] Proposed removal of DECnet support (was:Re: [BUG] 3.2-rc2:BUG kmalloc-8: Redzone overwritten)

From: Ben Hutchings <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 05 Dec 2011 01:23:52 +0000

On Sun, 2011-12-04 at 20:50 +0100, Philipp Schafft wrote:
> reflum,
> 
> On Wed, 2011-11-30 at 14:52 +0000, Steven Whitehouse wrote:
[...]
> > It is good to know that people are still using the Linux DECnet code
> > too. It has lived far beyond the time when I'd envisioned it still being
> > useful :-)
> 
> There are still some people interested in it. Btw. on Debian popcon
> counts 5356 users.

This is grossly misleading.  Here's the historical graph showing <100
installations of libdnet until early 2011:
http://qa.debian.org/popcon-graph.php?packages=libdnet

The increase in 2011 is not a sudden resurgence of interest; it comes
from roaraudio[1] users.  For some reason (a joke?) roaraudio has DECnet
support and its packages depend on libdnet.  You can see that the above
graph is precisely correlated with this:
http://qa.debian.org/popcon-graph.php?packages=libroar1

(And so far as I can work out, libroar1 is mostly being installed as a
dependency of an unofficial package of Xine.)

The only reason I know this is because there was a sudden spate of bug
reports on the kernel due to people getting dnet-common installed as a
recommendation of libdnet and then having their Ethernet MAC addresses
reconfigured for DECnet.

[1] Yet another audio mixing daemon

Ben.

-- 
Ben Hutchings
Absolutum obsoletum. (If it works, it's out of date.) - Stafford Beer