On 09/16/2010 01:20 AM, Hugh Hood wrote:
Steve,
Here's where things get interesting/confusing. A pre-10.6 OS X Mac _does_ already have an AppleTalk implementation by default, including NBP and (apparently) DDP.
(snip)
So, I'm still wondering what it would take for Netatalk to find and use the default built-in OS X AppleTalk implementation.
The best way to find out is to grab the sources and try running 'configure' on a pre-10.6 mac. If the appropriate header files are present in /usr/include it should detect it.
Ideally, it would only be a matter of a few Netatalk source code changes. Or, it could be a major headache that no one would want to take on. I'm not familiar enough with Netatalk to know exactly how it interacts with the Linux AppleTalk implementation to speculate.
Netatalk uses the kernel NBP and DDP services via standard system calls. I don't see any reason in theory why it couldn't do so on a Mac.