Arch Linux

ls

Member

Registered: 2024-04-22

Posts: 5

Please make openbsd-netcat the default netcat as gnu-netcat has no v6

Is it possible for Arch Linux repository maintainers to change the default provider of a package?

[root@f ~]# LC_ALL=C.UTF-8 pacman -S netcat
:: There are 2 providers available for netcat:
:: Repository extra
   1) gnu-netcat  2) openbsd-netcat

Enter a number (default=1): 2

gnu-netcat really shouldn't be the default as it is more than 21 years old and has no IPv6 support. openbsd-netcat should be the default. Is this possible to change or is it alphabetically sorted?

WorMzy

Administrator

From: Scotland

Registered: 2010-06-16

Posts: 13,020

Website

Re: Please make openbsd-netcat the default netcat as gnu-netcat has no v6

Mod note: moving to Pacman Issues.

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killertofus

Member

Registered: 2025-02-10

Posts: 46

Re: Please make openbsd-netcat the default netcat as gnu-netcat has no v6

according to the issue page it's getting removed so it will be a non issue soon™

gromit

Administrator

From: Germany

Registered: 2024-02-10

Posts: 1,318

Website

Re: Please make openbsd-netcat the default netcat as gnu-netcat has no v6

I'll try to look into it, from a first glance it should either be dropped or made ranking behind the openbsd variant.

seth

Member

From: Don't DM me only for attention

Registered: 2012-09-03

Posts: 69,173

Re: Please make openbsd-netcat the default netcat as gnu-netcat has no v6

Fwwi, nc (openbsd), netcat (gnu) and ncat (nmap) are not fully compatible implementations of the same concept.
A generic dependency will only work for basic invocation by the client process and if any user has some local scripts depending on gnu-netcat, simply replacing that w/ nc can cause weird failure b/c of colliding parameters (notably -t) or missing features.

You're almost looking at a java-like situation…

Compatible w/ all three:
https://github.com/marlam/msmtp/blob/ma … tpq/msmtpq has "nc -vz"
https://github.com/ugoviti/synbak/blob/ … s.sh#L1436 checks for netcat or nc and only uses "-w"

Hard-depends on openbsd-netcat:
https://archlinux.org/packages/extra/any/cloud-init/
https://archlinux.org/packages/extra/x86_64/libvirt/

Open question: https://archlinux.org/packages/extra/x86_64/zed/

The rest are make/check dependencies.

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