On Wed, 2023-11-01 at 15:27 -0500, Dan Williams wrote:
But... Time Machine debuted with 10.5 and AppleTalk got removed in 10.6; did the actual TimeCapsules ever support AppleTalk, or were they always TCP/IP-based?
netatalk has two actively maintained versions, one for AppleTalk (2.2.x series) and one for TCP/IP (3.x series). Both are still being developed and supported [1].
(also TimeMachine-capable Airport Extremes [A1354] are like $15 on eBay; that's cheaper than a Raspberry Pi)
I know that commercial entities don't have interest in legacy architectures and protocols. But Linux isn't a commercial-only project so legacy applications have a valid use case. Most people in the Linux community don't have a use case for IBM mainframes, yet they aren't in sending patches to get s390 support removed. I understand that sometimes old code needs to be dropped when it becomes a burden which is why I also agreed to drop ia64 support since I have heard complaints from multiple upstream projects and I also know that a lot of stuff there is broken with no one willing to fix it. But I don't understand the removal in this case. What particular burden does a legacy networking protocol pose if it can be easily disabled at compile time to reduce the attack surface?
This patch only removes the Linux-side ipddp driver (eg MacIP) so if Time Capsules never supported AppleTalk, this patch is unrelated to TimeMachine. What this patch *may* break is Linux as a MacIP gateway, allowing AppleTalk-only machines to talk TCP/IP to systems. But that's like what, the 128/512/Plus and PowerBook Duo/1xx? Everything else had a PDS/NuBus slot or onboard Ethernet and could do native MacTCP/OpenTransport...
Which is a valid use case for people from the retro-computing community as can be seen from the netatalk description above. I don't think that Arnd reached out to the netatalk project and asked whether the code is still needed, did he? Adrian
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netatalk
-- .''`. John Paul Adrian Glaubitz : :' : Debian Developer `. `' Physicist `- GPG: 62FF 8A75 84E0 2956 9546 0006 7426 3B37 F5B5 F913
