There are plenty of articles on the net… but here I’m posting my notes about compiling netatalk.

First of all, you need the minimum packages:

apt-get install build-essential dh-make autotools-dev

I needed this on my Raspberry Pi for this article, and I didn’t want to make dirty the system using the common “make / make install” commands.

This are the simple steps I’ve followed (all as root – even if it’s not the best practise).

mkdir /tmp/netatalk
cd /tmp/netatalk
wget http://downloads.sourceforge.net/project/netatalk/netatalk/3.1.7/netatalk-3.1.7.tar.gz
tar xzvf netatalk-3.1.7.tar.gz
cd netatalk-3.1.7

Make sure the folder has this format: <name_of_the_package>-<version> ALL in lowercase!

dh_make -e [email protected] -f ../netatalk-3.1.7.tar.gz

It will ask for the type of the package. To make things easier, just select single entering s.

Edit the file debian/control adding the missing bits (example below):

Source: netatalk
Section: net
Priority: extra
Maintainer: root <[email protected]>
Build-Depends: debhelper (>= 8.0.0), autotools-dev
Standards-Version: 3.9.3
Homepage: http://netatalk.sourceforge.net/
#Vcs-Git: git://git.debian.org/collab-maint/netatalk.git
#Vcs-Browser: http://git.debian.org/?p=collab-maint/netatalk.git;a=summary

Package: netatalk
Architecture: any
Depends: ${shlibs:Depends}, ${misc:Depends}
Description: AppleTalk user binaries
 Open Source AFP fileserver capable of serving many Macintosh clients simultaneously as an AppleShare file server (AFP)

Then, add debian/rules adding this line, to pass custom configure parameters:

override_dh_auto_configure:
	dh_auto_configure -- --with-init-style=debian-sysv --with-zeroconf

The <TAB> is what you have to press to indent the code. Without that TAB, the file won’t work properly. Before dh_auto_configure there is a TAB 🙂
MAKE SURE that the syntax gets highlighted like this:

I’ve read that it should be good to run dpkg-depcheck -d ./configure before the next step.
Honestly, I didn’t do that because it requires an extra package called devscripts that installs loads of dependencies, which I didn’t want to add on my Raspberry pi.
In a different situation, I would probably have done that.

Then run:

dpkg-buildpackage -us -uc

…and wait.

If you get something like this…

dpkg-deb: building package `netatalk' in `../netatalk_3.1.7-1_armhf.deb'.
dpkg-genchanges >../netatalk_3.1.7-1_armhf.changes
dpkg-genchanges: including full source code in upload
dpkg-source --after-build netatalk-3.1.7
dpkg-buildpackage: full upload (original source is included)

…you’ve been lucky! And you can cd .. and you should have your package .deb created and ready to be installed with a simple dpkg -i .deb

Good luck! 🙂

NOTE: I’ve noticed that the compile might fail due to ‘acl‘ package missing. I’m not a master in compiling, so what I’ve done is the following

apt-get install acl

Than I’ve modified include/atalk/acl.h start at line 63, adding #define O_IGNORE 0 to make it look like following:

#define O_NETATALK_ACL 0
#define O_IGNORE 0
#define chmod_acl chmod

This trick was from here
Than, you need to commit the change with the following command: dpkg-source --commit and save adding a little description like “patch to compile with no ACLs” or something like that.
This made me possible to finish the building of the package and have the deb.

 

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UPDATE: Debian jessy systemd

# Packages to install

apt-get install build-essential libevent-dev libssl-dev libgcrypt11-dev libkrb5-dev libpam0g-dev libwrap0-dev libdb-dev libtdb-dev libmysqlclient-dev avahi-daemon libavahi-client-dev libacl1-dev libldap2-dev libcrack2-dev systemtap-sdt-dev libdbus-1-dev libdbus-glib-1-dev libglib2.0-dev tracker libtracker-sparql-1.0-dev libtracker-miner-1.0-dev autotools-dev debhelper 

# How to edit debian/rules

override_dh_auto_configure:
	dh_auto_configure -- --with-init-style=debian-systemd  --without-libevent --without-tdb --with-cracklib --enable-krbV-uam --with-pam-confdir=/etc/pam.d --with-dbus-sysconf-dir=/etc/dbus-1/system.d --with-tracker-pkgconfig-version=1.0

And here the already compiled file netatalk_3.1.8