[Pkg-netatalk-devel] Packaging netatalk2

[Daniel Markstedt]

A quick update on this effort:

I found the sources for 2.2.6-3 in the Salsa repo:
https://salsa.debian.org/netatalk-team/netatalk/-/tree/debian/2.2.6-3/debian/patches?ref_type=tags

So I went ahead and created new branch "debian/old" off of this and
started bringing it up to date:
https://salsa.debian.org/netatalk-team/netatalk/-/tree/debian/old

Now I have something that is using the very latest 2.2.10 release sources.
It generates a seemingly fully working deb on Bullseye! More testing
needed though.
See the changelog for all of the incremental improvements I made along the way.
It was a lot of learning and labor to get to this point, but I'm very
happy with how it turned out.

TODOs:
- Bump compat level to 10
- Port over any other incremental improvements to debian files from
the debian/latest branch
- Figure out why deb-systemd-helper throws errors for afpd.service and
cnid.service (both work afterwards)
- See if we can link with WolfSSL as a drop in replacement for OpenSSL
- Change package name to "netatalk2" and make it conflict with "netatalk"
--> I have a 90% working solution for the latter, but have one bug
with the pam.d configuration override

Cheers!

Daniel

On Sat, Mar 4, 2023 at 9:37 AM Daniel Markstedt <markstedt at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> To recap a private thread with Jonas:
>
> I'm proposing introducing a netatalk2 package, based off of the recently released netatalk 2.2.8.
> The argument for having a netatalk2 package on top of the existing netatalk (3) one, is that the former retains the entire AppleTalk (DDP) networking stack with associated daemons and tooling.
> With the rise of retro computing, more and more people are trying to network their old Mac and Apple IIs.
>
> There are several downstream projects that rely on netatalk2, such as macipgw, A2SERVER, RetroNAS, MacIPpi, PiSCSI, etc.
>
> Additionally, Debian is the only Linux distro I know of that ships with AppleTalk kernel support out of the box, so all the scaffolding is already in place!
>
> I did see that a historical 2.2.6 package seems to have existed in Debian, so perhaps this can be used as a template?
> The main changes from a packaging perspective between 2.2.6 and 2.2.8, that I can think of off the top of my head are:
> - systemd configuration added
> - DDP enabled by default
>
> For the former, I think we should use the new systemd unit configurations (--enable-systemd) rather than the traditional Debian init scripts (--enable-debian).
> For the latter, this simplifies configuration a bit, since you don't have to pass --enable-ddp --enable-timelord --enable-a2boot anymore to get the whole AppleTalk suite.
>
> Speaking about systemd, I'd suggest pulling in this as a downstream patch. It's important for folks running netatalk on RPis, which is a pretty common usecase these days.
> https://github.com/Netatalk/netatalk/pull/233
>
> Best,
> Daniel