On Sat, Nov 20, 2010 at 03:35:56PM -0400, Joey Hess wrote:
Jonas Smedegaard wrote:Even if the historical underlying network protocol, Appletalk, have been abandoned by Apple for quite some time, netatalk also works on top of tcp, and is is in active use among Macintosh users, I believe: It is an essential part of the backup routine "time machine".Doing so seems to involve: * Rebuilding netatalk with ssl support (impossible to do in debian due to license incompatability; #565969)
Unneeded for recent versions of MacOS X: Recent netatalk supports newer encryption scheme DHX2 which do not require OpenSSL and thus is enabled in Debian builds.
You may notice that bug#565969 has been closed :-)
* Manually configuring avahi to advertise the netatalk server (bug #566114 asks that this be done by default) (And avahi was never installed as part of the file-server task.)
True for timemachine, not for plain filesharing.
* Creating a magic file (.com.apple.timemachine.supported) to make time machine deign to use the volume.
True for timemachine, not for plain filesharing.
* Hope and pray, since all the documentation about people doing this seems to date from 2007-2008, and who knows what has broken since then.
Possibly true for timemachine, not for plain filesharing.
This does not seem to be at a level of integration suitable for tasksel.Probably one or two steps could be skipped to use netatalk as a generic file server for OS X, without time machine. But since OS X can use both NFS and SMB as a client, apparently trivially, supporting a third protocol in the file-server task seems unnecessary.(BTW, time machine can also be used with NFS and SMB.)
I mentioned timemachine to point out that Apple Filesharing seems not in the process of being phased out by Apple, even if MacOS X also supports alien filesharing protocols.
There are benefits using a native filesharing protocol, similar to the benefits of using ext[2-4] locally instead of vfat.
So my argument stand: If the purpose of the file-server task is to offer support for heterogenous filesharing, then I recommend to keep including netatalk. It actually makes *better* sense to do now than with Etch due to the DHX2 encryption added after the Etch release!
- Jonas -- * Jonas Smedegaard - idealist & Internet-arkitekt * Tlf.: +45 40843136 Website: http://dr.jones.dk/ [x] quote me freely [ ] ask before reusing [ ] keep private
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