Compiling and installing Netatalk via building Debian/Ubuntu deb packages.

We need the following dependencies. libtracker is a library to make netatalk volumes searchable by Apple Spotlight.

 apt install libdb5.3 libdb5.3-dev dbus-dev libdbus-glib-1-dev \
   libmysqlclient-dev libtracker-miner-2.0-dev

The following tools are required to create the deb packages

 apt install autoreconf dh-autoreconf autotools-dev dh-systemd

We prepare the workspace.

 mkdir netatalk-build && cd netatalk-build/

We get the scripts that will do the building. I have found them on launchpad.

 wget https://serverblog.cwrose.de/downloads/netatalk_3.1.11-debian-build-scripts.tar.xz
 tar xf netatalk_3.1.11-debian-build-scripts.tar.xz

Now we setup the changelog and remove the tarball md5.

 export new_upstream_version=3.1.12-ubuntu1-cro~xenial
 dch -v ${new_upstream_version}-1 "Dummy changelog entry"
 sed -i -e 's/^\(DEB_UPSTREAM_TARBALL_MD5\b\)/#\1/' debian/rules

Now it is time to build the thing. DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS=openssl basically tells the build process to allow it building with ssl support.

 cd ../netatalk/netatalk-3.1.12/
 cp ../../netatalk-build/debian .
 cp -rp ../../netatalk-build/debian .
 DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS=openssl debian/rules debian/rules
 debian/rules binary

And the resulting packages can be installed

 dpkg -i netatalk_3.1.12-ubuntu1-cro~xenial-1_amd64.deb
 dpkg -i libatalk18_3.1.12-ubuntu1-cro~xenial-1_amd64.deb