Hello!I have became maintainer of Avahi project, but I am unable to fully focus on it. I need help from community. I think Avahi is quite interesting project and is waiting for unlocking its potential. Avahi provides multicast DNS resolution and publishing of services. It is relatively widely used by various popular services. It is used by Steam game platform to discover Steam Link instances for example. It is also quite heavily used by Apple devices to publish and detect its peripherals on network. Many Apple users are detectable simply by running avahi-browse command.
It can offer resolution of local network names and is heavily used by CUPS for printing. But there are more usages.
But the code were not actively worked on for years. I do not think the code is unfixable, but making changes now is quite challenging. Because we lack decent testing to keep fixing existing issues not introduce a new ones.
If you like local communication between devices and can read and understand mDNS RFC, please consider helping with Avahi. Especially Apple device fans could improve their Linux interaction with their other devices. Apple is the company behind mDNS protocol specification and is actively pushing it forward. Unfortunately Avahi does not keep pace with introducing new features.
What we need now is in my opinion:* Test improvements - Evgeny Vereshchagin made awesome work introducing many github PR checks into upstream project. But I think we need more container based testing, connected over network and exchanging messages. We do not have any of those now. Avahi uses DBus to communicate with its clients on localhost, therefore just network namespaces are not enough. If you have any experience with testing container communication, perhaps you can contribute.
* Documentation improvements - Avahi contains a lot of various bindings, but not best maintained ones. I think we should focus on exposing DBus calls directly and deprecate many of those. I certainly do not know C# or similar languages. - Avahi uses old docbook format. I think restructured text would be much easier to maintain and have nicer output. If you would know how to make automatic conversion, it would be great!
* Code improvements - We have found and fixed couple of issues, but discovered even more of new ones. The code were in barely maintained mode for years and it shows. It is not non-fixable, but without proper testing it is not simple to fix something without breaking something else. Any C coder with some experience with DBus would be useful. If you can, can you create some pull requests? We have no easy fixes, but where would be fun in those?
We have moved avahi to own github organization at https://github.com/avahi. But there are too few people now and not short list issues. We could use extra hands. We all have extra responsibilities and cannot focus only on Avahi. Can you help?
Thanks! Petr -- Petr Menšík Senior Software Engineer, RHEL Red Hat, http://www.redhat.com/ PGP: DFCF908DB7C87E8E529925BC4931CA5B6C9FC5CB
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