Endless Avahi system.log errors

[dershow]

Recently my system.log started containing the following, repeated every 10 seconds:

Feb  2 14:16:35 Macintosh org.freedesktop.avahi-dnsconfd[808]: connect(): No such file or directory
Feb  2 14:16:35 Macintosh org.freedesktop.avahi-dnsconfd[808]: Failed to connect to the daemon. This probably means that you
Feb  2 14:16:35 Macintosh org.freedesktop.avahi-dnsconfd[808]: didn't start avahi-daemon before avahi-dnsconfd.
Feb  2 14:16:35 Macintosh com.apple.launchd[1] (org.freedesktop.avahi-dnsconfd[808]): Exited with exit code: 1
Feb  2 14:16:35 Macintosh com.apple.launchd[1] (org.freedesktop.avahi-dnsconfd): Throttling respawn: Will start in 10 seconds
Feb  2 14:16:36 Macintosh org.freedesktop.avahi-daemon[809]: Found user 'avahi' (UID 502) and group 'avahi' (GID 502).
Feb  2 14:16:36 Macintosh org.freedesktop.avahi-daemon[809]: Successfully dropped root privileges.
Feb  2 14:16:36 Macintosh org.freedesktop.avahi-daemon[809]: avahi-daemon 0.6.22 starting up.
Feb  2 14:16:36 Macintosh org.freedesktop.avahi-daemon[809]: WARNING: No NSS support for mDNS detected, consider installing nss-mdns!
Feb  2 14:16:36 Macintosh org.freedesktop.avahi-daemon[809]: dbus_bus_get_private(): Failed to connect to socket /opt/local/var/run/dbus/system_bus_socket: No such file or directory
Feb  2 14:16:36 Macintosh org.freedesktop.avahi-daemon[809]: WARNING: Failed to contact D-Bus daemon.
Feb  2 14:16:36 Macintosh com.apple.launchd[1] (org.freedesktop.avahi-daemon[809]): Exited with exit code: 255
Feb  2 14:16:36 Macintosh com.apple.launchd[1] (org.freedesktop.avahi-daemon): Throttling respawn: Will start in 10 seconds

Avahi is installed as a dependent to something else. So I am not sure what actually will fail. But clearly the above means that Avahi is not working, and is generating a lot of data in my logs. I did try to restart, but that didn't change anything.

[dershow]

I went through my system.log and realized that this started after my first reboot in a long time. So it seems that some port update, followed by a reboot, causes this problem. My understanding is that some launchd changes don't "take" until after a reboot. So my suspicion is that something about how launchd and avahi interact is not handled correctly. But that this change doesn't happen until there is a reboot.

[nox@…]

So this is likely caused by the recent gnome-vfs upgrade, which now depends on avahi instead of the howl dead project. I will look at this problem.