[heads up] axing AppleTalk and IPX/SPX

[Ian Lepore]

On Mon, 2013-10-28 at 19:54 +0100, Stefan Bethke wrote:
> Am 28.10.2013 um 13:42 schrieb Gleb Smirnoff <glebius at FreeBSD.org>:
> 
> >  The plan is two axe two old networking protocols from FreeBSD head/,
> > meaning that FreeBSD 11.0-RELEASE, available in couple of years would
> > be shipped without them.
> > 
> > 1) AppleTalk
> > 
> >   Last time claimed to be supported by vendor in 2007[1]. In practice
> >   had very little use since 90th.
> >   Discontinued by major routing equipment vendors since 2009[2].
> 
> Since Apple has now even deprecated AFP (the file sharing protocol implemented by netatalk, among others), it’s time to let go.
> 
> There’s a thriving historic enthusiast community around older Macs and Apple IIs, and I can report that FreeBSD 4 (including then-current versions of netatalk and for those who care, macipgw) works just fine in VirtualBox, on FreeBSD 9-stable. Newer FreeBSD versions will likely work as well. Since AppleTalk (DDP and the layer 3 protocols on top of it) were originally tuned for LocalTalk and it’s 230.4 kbps rate, running a virtualized OS on even very modest hardware will likely incur no performance penalty, so just shove a VM onto any old box.
> 

Remember too that what's really being said here is that it will be gone
from 11; it's still in FreeBSD 10, and that means FreeBSD will still
support those protocols (as much as possible given the lack of upstream
support) for many years to come.

Think of this as "You have about 4 years to make other arrangements
before this support is gone."

-- Ian