Hi folks,
There's a lot of good reasons to see netatalk v3 packaged for Debian,
since there are features v2 just doesn't have such as hosting for
Apple's Time Machine backups and the like.
That said however, there is a bit of a spanner in the works because
upstream decided to abandon support for the DDP (AppleTalk) ethernet
protocol that exists alongside TCP/IP. Their argument is that all
but vintage Apple computers pre-MacOS X actually use DDP, so it's now
quite obsolete.
If however you know anybody who actually has some of these now
vintage computers networked using DDP (hi!), they're unlikely to be
pleased to see their network suddenly disappear on upgrade to v3. I
don't have a lot of expectation that such old machines should be
allowed anywhere near the public internet, but on a firewalled LAN,
eh why not?
Obviously v2 and v3 cannot coexist on the same machine, at least for
now. I'm investigating whether or not v2 can be cut down to coexist
on a machine with netatalk v3 to support old clients. Perhaps with a
smaller target (only supporting those legacy clients), it might be
easier to evaluate patches made to v3 that may affect things like
security.
Anyway, just registering my interest in the outcome of this issue
whenever it gets resolved. :)
Joseph
