Can you name some reasons why you believe that nss-mnds and avahi are
compromising security? I don't see any, they just help you to make it
easier to find and use network services, they do not enable any service
themselves. The security implications come with the question whether you
actually trust and *use* a service (like DAAP in Rhythmbox, or sshing to
foo.local instead of an IP number). nss-mdns and avahi do not, and
cannot, change anything in your personal trust relations.

Calling avahi "pernicious and insidious" is unfounded, and to be honest,
it's just plain FUD. It might indicate that you misunderstood the
purpose of it? Avahi just provides a service catalog, nothing more.
Nothing in the desktop depends on it, or even assumes that it provides
correct information, and desktop services like DAAP music sharing are
not even enbaled by default. We only enable libnss-mnds by default,
because it doesn't change any security properties of name resolution.

So I strongly object against dropping avahi and libnss-mdns from the
seeds (mind that the entire purpose of *-desktop is to pull in packages,
which makes Suggests: totally worthless). Avahi and nss-mdns ease the
usage of network services, which is an important thing in a "make it
just work" desktop distribution.

However, I do agree that they should be changed from Depends: to
Recommends: (like libnss-mdns already), so that you can uninstall them
without removing *-desktop. I don't think there is a particular reason
for making them strong dependencies, that's more or less just because of
historical reasons.

** Summary changed:

- avahi should be downgraded to Suggests dependency
+ avahi should be downgraded to Recommends:

-- 
avahi should be downgraded to Recommends:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/192258
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