Please improve resolution of domain names ending in ".local"

Avahi uses the ".local" domain and so do many local sites and ISPs. Currently the avahi daemon is programmed to disable itself if it thinks that it is on a network where DNS has a ".local" TLD. (The current test is subject to false negatives as described in bug #80900, but that's another issue.)

It was observed in the discussion of bug #327362 that it would be better if a distinction were made between mDNS style names of the form NAME.local and other names of the form: NAME.NAME[.NAME...].local such that the former are resolved by mDNS and the latter by DNS. That appears to be how Mac OS X v10.6 does it (http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3473).

"Host names that contain only one label in addition to local, for example "My-Computer.local", are resolved using Multicast DNS (Bonjour) by default. Host names that contain two or more labels in addition to local, for example "server.domain.local", are resolved using a DNS server by default.

Additionally, Mac OS X v10.6 automatically detects when the local network operator has set up a name server that will answer name requests for a domain ending in ".local". It does this by checking to see if there is a Start Of Authority (SOA) record for the top level domain "local", which is how a DNS server indicates that it claims to have authority over a part of the DNS namespace. As long as the DNS server is properly configured with the required SOA record, Mac OS X v10.6 will detect this SOA record and automatically use this server to look up all host names in the domain."

It is wished that Ubuntu implement this behavior.