What is the terrible mDNS responder?

Suppose you have the Hurd running on a another machine in your local network. ssh <IP-ADDRESS> is not guarenteed to work, because your router will occassionally change the IP address of your Hurd machine. That's kind of annoying! Luckily, Sergey wrote the terrible-mDNS responder, so that ssh <hostname>.local just works! How cool is that!?

To be very clear, this does not teach the system to do mDNS queries (.local hostname lookups). The terrible-mDNS-responder only responds to other host's queries. (Those other hosts may be running Avahi or sd-rd or Apple's mDNSResponder or LookupServer or ...)

The sources are over on GitHub. There are no dependencies other than a libc. It's built with Meson and licensed under AGPL v3+. It even comes with an awkward attempt at a sysv init script! What's not to like?

How to use it on Debian GNU/Hurd?

$ git clone git@github.com:bugaevc/terrible-mdns-responder.git
$ cd terrible-mdns-responder
$ meson setup build # you may need to apt install meson
$ ninja -C build
$ sudo ninja install -C build
$ sudo update-rc.d terrible-mdns-responder defaults
$ sudo update-rc.d avahi-daemon disable
$ sudo service terrible-mdns-responder start

FAQ Why not use avahi?

Debian GNU/Hurd comes with Avahi in the default install (I believe). Avahi has never worked for me (on the Hurd), and I doubt it has ever worked for anyone else either. I have looked into the why (as in spent hours debugging and patching it); I don't remember the specifics, but I do remember that I concluded it won't be easy to make it work. So, a dead end.