Debian – Why Host from Bind9-Host is Deprecated and When

bind9debianhostname

I was looking at bind9-host 

shirish@debian:"04 Jan 2020 15:48:02" ~$ aptitude show bind9-host=1:9.11.5.P4+dfsg-5.1+b1
Package: bind9-host                      
Version: 1:9.11.5.P4+dfsg-5.1+b1
State: installed
Automatically installed: no
Priority: standard
Section: net
Maintainer: Debian DNS Team <team+dns@tracker.debian.org>
Architecture: amd64
Uncompressed Size: 369 k
Compressed Size: 271 k
Filename: pool/main/b/bind9/bind9-host_9.11.5.P4+dfsg-5.1+b1_amd64.deb
Checksum-FileSize: 271156
MD5Sum: 8cd326a23a51acdb773df5b7dce76060
SHA256: 977287c7212e9d3e671b85fdd04734b4908fe86d4b3581e47fb86d8b27cfdb3b
Archive: testing
Depends: libbind9-161 (= 1:9.11.5.P4+dfsg-5.1+b1), libdns1104 (= 1:9.11.5.P4+dfsg-5.1+b1), libisc1100 (= 1:9.11.5.P4+dfsg-5.1+b1), libisccfg163 (= 1:9.11.5.P4+dfsg-5.1+b1), liblwres161 (= 1:9.11.5.P4+dfsg-5.1+b1),      libc6 (>= 2.14), libcap2 (>= 1:2.10), libcom-err2 (>= 1.43.9), libfstrm0 (>= 0.2.0), libgeoip1, libgssapi-krb5-2 (>= 1.6.dfsg.2), libidn2-0 (>= 2.0.0), libjson-c4 (>= 0.13.1), libk5crypto3 (>= 1.6.dfsg.2), libkrb5-3 (>=         1.6.dfsg.2), liblmdb0 (>= 0.9.6), libprotobuf-c1 (>= 1.0.0), libssl1.1 (>= 1.1.0), libxml2 (>= 2.6.27)
Provides: host
Description: DNS lookup utility (deprecated)
 This package provides /usr/bin/host, a simple utility (bundled with the BIND 9.X sources) which can be used for converting domain names to IP addresses and the reverse. 

 This utility is deprecated, use dig or delv from the dnsutils package.
Homepage: https://www.isc.org/downloads/bind/

What is and was interesting to me is that while the utility itself is being deprecated and has numerous issues with the program itself, the utility still seems to be there in keeping it but don't see it why? I also don't see any deprecation notice or documentation in /usr/share/doc/bind9-host . There is usually a NEWS.gz which gives this info. but in this package there isn't one. Changelog.gz and others don't have.

Interestingly, they continue to do it – 

$ apt-cache policy bind9-host
bind9-host:
  Installed: 1:9.11.5.P4+dfsg-5.1+b1
  Candidate: 1:9.11.5.P4+dfsg-5.1+b1
  Version table:
     1:9.15.7-1 100
        100 http://cdn-fastly.deb.debian.org/debian experimental/main amd64 Packages
     1:9.11.14+dfsg-1 100
        100 http://cdn-fastly.deb.debian.org/debian unstable/main amd64 Packages
 *** 1:9.11.5.P4+dfsg-5.1+b1 900
        900 http://cdn-fastly.deb.debian.org/debian testing/main amd64 Packages
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status

Best Answer

host is not deprecated by Internet Systems Consortium, the BIND company. It does not even deprecate nslookup as it once did.

This deprecation of host was done in 2018 by a Debian Developer, on xyr own initiative, in response to a 2013 Debian bug report about the package description that did not actually mention deprecation. The Debian package description the only place where deprecation is mentioned, and there is no rationale for it.

If one were going to deprecate ISC tools — again — there is a far more obvious better place to start.

As a Debian user, you might like to submit a bug report about this deprecation.

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