netatalk.io

Netatalk 2.4.0


REDISTRIBUTION LICENSING ALERT

If you redistribute binary Netatalk packages, please be advised that there may be incompatible licensing terms in this source package. To avoid potential issues when redistributing, it is strongly recommended to build this package with -Dwith-embedded-ssl=false when using the Meson build system. The Autotools build system is not affected. Alternatively, upgrade to Netatalk 2.4.2 or later.

Netatalk 2.4.0 is available!

The Netatalk team is proud to announce the first release in the Netatalk 2.4 release series. Unlike the Netatalk 3.x releases, 2.x maintains support for the AppleTalk transport layer for networking with very old Mac and Apple II clients.

This release contains a number of breaking changes compared to Netatalk 2.3, and is recommended for early adopters. It is highly recommended that you take a backup of your production environment before attempting to upgrade an existing Netatalk deployment to 2.4.0.

A companion release of the Webmin Module (v2.0) is also available, with support for the new and updated features in Netatalk 2.4.0, as well as much added functionality.

Please see NEWS for the full changelog.

New Features

Meson build system

The Meson build system has been introduced, and exists in parallel with the traditional GNU Autotools build system. We plan to remove Autotools in a future feature release version of Netatalk.

One noticeable, practical difference compared to Autotools, is that all features are enabled by default. If the requisite libraries and headers are found, the feature will be compiled. If they are not found, a warning will be left in the setup log.

Additionally, whereas Autotools had a hodgepodge of --enable-*|--disable-*|--with-*|--without-* options, Meson only has -Dwith-* which are booleans that take true|false, or -Dwith-*-path options that are of the string type and take the path to libraries, headers, or binaries.

Some options were renamed in Meson to align with Netatalk 3.x:

Please see INSTALL for detailed instructions how to use the new build system. The online manual also has a new appendix with build instructions for specific operating systems.

Consequently, starting with this release, we no longer distribute tarballs that were bootstrapped by autoconf. We still ship the bootstrap script and all the macros required so that you can bootstrap it yourself if needed.

Bundled WolfSSL

OpenSSL 3.0 has deprecated the DHCAST128 and DES encryption algorithms used by Apple’s DHX and Random Number UAMs, respectively. These UAMs are used for (somewhat) secure authentication with very old Mac OS clients (early OS X, Classic Mac OS, and Apple IIGS.)

We are now bundling a subset of WolfSSL with Netatalk, as the default encryption provider for these UAMs. Building Netatalk with bundled WolfSSL requires the use of the Meson build system.

Init Scripts

An OpenRC init script has been added, which was adapted from the existing Gentoo init script.

Dependency Changes

LDAP API

We have bumped the LDAP API version, and now require OpenLDAP v2.3 or later.

As a result, a new afp.conf option ldap_uri has been introduced, while the old ldap_server has been removed. The new option has a different syntax. See the manual for more information.

Perl

The Perl runtime is now an optional dependency for Netatalk (it was previously mandatory.) Only when Perl is detected at compile time, the administrative CLI utilities that use the Perl runtime are installed.

Deprecated Features

The following runtime options have been removed.

What’s Changed

Full Changelog: https://github.com/Netatalk/netatalk/compare/netatalk-2-3-2…netatalk-2-4-0

Note: The Debian deb package distributed with this release is built for Debian 12 Bookworm.


Release published on 2024-06-22

Generated from GitHub Release Notes