[Pkg-netatalk-devel] Packaging netatalk2

Daniel Markstedt markstedt at gmail.com
Sat Mar 4 17:37:37 GMT 2023


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
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://alioth-lists.debian.net/pipermail/pkg-netatalk-devel/attachments/20230304/9d2a2d5c/attachment.htm>


More information about the pkg-netatalk-devel mailing list