Debian/Ubuntu: Why was the service renamed from bind9 to named?

[Dennis Clarke]

On 4/15/20 8:15 AM, Ondřej Surý wrote:
> Klaus,
> 
> the default and preferred init system on both Debian and Ubuntu is systemd,
> and the unit has proper Alias, so it is recognized also under "bind9" name.
> 
> The sysv-rc script doesn’t have the capability of aliases, so unfortunately, there’s
> a downfall from the renaming, but it would not make sense to have a different name
> for different init systems. If you are using sysvinit, the choice and the suffering that
> comes from that choice is all yours.
> 
> The renaming was done as it was a logical choice, the service is starting a daemon,
> and not a package, and daemon name is `named`. Also it is the name used by RPM
> based systems and Arch Linux and Gentoo, so it was also made to make BIND 9 packages
> in Debian/Ubuntu more unified with rest of the Linux world.
> 

An even more beautiful name would have been "iscbind" :

beta$ svcs -l iscbind
fmri         svc:/network/dns/iscbind:default
name         ISC BIND 9.11.16 SPARC V9 genunix
enabled      true
state        online
next_state   none
state_time   Thu Feb 20 04:35:15 2020
logfile      /var/svc/log/network-dns-iscbind:default.log
restarter    svc:/system/svc/restarter:default
contract_id  196663
dependency   require_all/none svc:/system/filesystem/local (online)
dependency   require_any/error svc:/network/loopback (online)
dependency   optional_all/error svc:/milestone/network (online)
beta$

Sadly the newer releases will never be *easily* ported back to old
Solaris but we all need to move forwards.

-- 
Dennis Clarke
RISC-V/SPARC/PPC/ARM/CISC
UNIX and Linux spoken
GreyBeard and suspenders optional