Re: [PATCH net-next] net: appletalk: remove Apple/Farallon LocalTalk PC support

[Arnd Bergmann <arnd@arndb.de>]

On Thu, May 12, 2022 at 8:11 PM James Carlson <carlsonj@workingcode.com> wrote:
>
> On 5/11/22 04:23, Arnd Bergmann wrote:
> > indication of appletalk ever being supported there, this all looks
> > IPv4/IPv6 specific. There was support for PPP_IPX until it was
> > dropped this year (the kernel side got removed in 2018), but never
> > for PPP_AT.
> > Adding Paul Mackerras to Cc, he might know more about it.
>
> I waited a bit before chipping in, as I think Paul would know more.
>
> The ATCP stuff was in at least a few vendor branches, but I don't think
> it ever made it into the main distribution. These commits seem to be
> where the (disabled by default) references to it first appeared:
>
> commit 50c9469f0f683c7bf8ebad9b7f97bfc03c6a4122
> Author: Paul Mackerras <paulus@samba.org>
> Date:   Tue Mar 4 03:32:37 1997 +0000
>
>     add defs for appletalk
>
> commit 01548ef15e0f41f9f6af33860fb459a7f578f004
> Author: Paul Mackerras <paulus@samba.org>
> Date:   Tue Mar 4 03:41:17 1997 +0000
>
>     connect time stuff gone to auth.c,
>     don't die on EINTR from opening tty,
>     ignore NCP packets during authentication,
>     fix recursive signal problem in kill_my_pg

Right, I had seen those in the git history, but neither of them actually
does anything with appletak.

> The disabled-by-default parts were likely support contributions for
> those other distributions. (Very likely in BSD.)
>
> I would've thought AppleTalk was completely gone by now, and I certainly
> would not be sad to see the dregs removed from pppd, but there was a
> patch release on the netatalk package just last month, so what do I know?

I think netatalk 3.0 dropped all appletalk protocol stuff a long time ago and
only supports AFP over IP.

         Arnd