[Pkg-netatalk-devel] netatalk

[Brian Campbell]

On Mon, Feb 10, 2014 at 6:11 PM, Chris Boot <debian at bootc.net> wrote:
> On 10/02/14 10:34, Jonas Smedegaard wrote:
>> Hi Chris,
>>
>> Quoting Chris Boot (2014-01-21 09:09:54)
>>> I'm a regular user of netatalk for its Time Machine functionality, and
>>> can't help but notice that it's lagging behind upstream's releases by
>>> quite a long way now. I can't see any RFH bugs or similar, but I
>>> thought I'd offer to help, even co-maintain if you wish.
>>>
>>> I'm a fairly recent DM but I maintain a number of packages already,
>>> including ppp which I like to think I've brought back to life. My
>>> overview page is:
>>> http://qa.debian.org/developer.php?login=debian@bootc.net
>>>
>>> Please let me know if you would like to accept my offer of assistance,
>>> and if you do what kind of tasks you would like me to start with on
>>> netatalk.
>>
>> First of all: Sorry for the late reply!
>>
>> Sounds great!
>>
>> Please request membership of the Netatalk team at Alioth:
>> https://alioth.debian.org/projects/pkg-netatalk/
>>
>> Also (when available - I requested it just now so it may take a day
>> before it is created) subscribe to the related mailinglist.
>>
>> ...and then let's discuss details at that list instead of discretely
>> here. :-)
>
> Hi chaps,
>
> So here I am. I've requested to join the pkg-netatalk project on Alioth
> and joined the list. I'd love to know how I can help out!
>
> FWIW since my email to you I've had to revoke my GPG key (long story)
> and am in the process of getting my new one replaced into the keyring.
>
> Looking forward to hearing from you.
>
> Cheers,
> Chris

Hi Chris and Jonas!

I work for a company that sells NAS hardware for video editing, and
we've recently moved to being based on Debian (well, Ubuntu LTS
technically, but I prefer to do my work on Jessie/Sid and backport it
to our distro). We've discovered over the years that for our use case,
AFP is considerably more efficient than SMB, so given that many of our
customers use Mac OS X and want to squeeze the best performance out of
the cheapest hardware possible, having good AFP support is essential.
Over the past few years we've been working closely with Ralph Böhme
and Frank Lahm of NetAFP to add features and fix bugs that we need.

I've already done the work to package Netatalk 2.2.5, the latest
released version of Netatalk 2.2.x. I should probably poke Ralph to
see if he can release 2.2.6, since there are a couple of fixes in
upstream Git that for bugs that we've run into; otherwise I'll just
apply those as patches in my packaging. I'm fairly new to Debian
packaging; I've used Debian and Ubuntu plenty in the past, but this
move to being Debian based, which involves packaging our own software
as well as upgrading and patching things like Samba and Netatalk, has
been the first Debian packaging experience that I've had.

The one big open question on Netatalk packaging for Debian is whether
and how to package Netatalk 3. Since it has a new config file format,
and no automatic migration tool, I'm wondering if it would be best to
package it as netatalk3 for Jessie, to give a transitional period
during which both are available and allow people to update their
configuration at their leisure.

For my purposes, I'm also working with Netatalk upstream to add one
feature that Natatalk 3 is missing, the ability to use variable
substitutions to have the same share name map to different actual
directories, which is useful in certain setups. Once that's done,
we'll move to Netatalk 3, and it doesn't really matter to us whether
there's a transitional period; we automatically generate the
configuration based on other data, so once we upgrade we'll just
generate the new config file format.

-- Brian