[Xastir] Proposed removal of kernel AX.25 support

[David Ranch]

I replied to that thread over on the Debian-hams list and I encourage 
others active Linux packet users to chime in as well.  I agree that AGW 
or KISS support within Xastir is fine for most Xastir needs but there 
are MANY other applications out there that depend on all their I/O to go 
through libax25.  If we loose that transport, many many packet programs 
( https://radio.linux.org.au/?sectpat=packet&ordpat=title ) and really 
powerful routing capabilities will no longer function.

--David
KI6ZHD


On 07/27/2019 07:07 AM, Lee D Bengston wrote:
> Not long ago I finally made the switch to DireWolf from an old Kantronics
> TNC.  With AGW and KISS over TCP interfaces, TNC sharing among applications
> is easier then ever with no dependency on Linux AX25 networking.
>
> Lee K5DAT
>
>
> On Fri, Jul 26, 2019 at 3:13 PM David A Aitcheson <david.aitcheson at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>> Forwarded from  debian-hams at lists.debian.org  =--to-->
>> xastir at lists.xastir.org
>>
>> de Dave KB3EFS
>>
>>
>> On 7/26/19 2:10 PM, Iain Learmonth wrote:
>>> Hi,
>>>
>>> I am a maintainer for the libax25 and ax25-apps packages, and these
>>> packages are not in great shape. These are userspace packages that
>>> compliment the AX.25 networking support in the Linux kernel. I would
>>> like to propose that we do not ship these packages, or otherwise use the
>>> kernel AX.25 support, in the next Debian release.
>>>
>>> Support for the AX.25 stack is currently not present on arm64 (#920651).
>>> I am not sure if this is due to it being broken there or it simply
>>> wasn't enabled. Regardless, it has been broken recently in ways that
>>> seriously affect its usability. There are just not enough people looking
>>> at it or taking care of it.
>>>
>>> The userspace packages also have long standing bugs (#605946) that have
>>> not been fixed by the upstream. In the last 2 releases of Debian we have
>>> shipped release candidate packages as no release has been made.
>>>
>>> The following packages would be affected and I propose would be removed:
>>>
>>> libax25-dev
>>> ax25mail-utils
>>> ax25-tools
>>> ax25-apps
>>>
>>> The following packages would be affected and I propose should be built
>>> without support for kernel AX.25:
>>>
>>> xastir (checked, it's fine)
>>> uronode (checked, it's fine)
>>> aprsdigi (did not check if possible yet)
>>> fbb (did not check if possible yet)
>>>
>>> This is a change to something that's been around for a while, and it
>>> affects more than just my packages, so I'm bringing this to the mailing
>>> list for discussion. I have pretty much made up my mind that this is the
>>> right thing to do but I will listen to compelling counter-arguments.
>>>
>>> Thanks,
>>> Iain.