Re: status of npf maintenance

Hi Greg,

I took on NPF few months ago and there has been some work done.  Will commit them to trunk soon for the next releases.
I would be committing them to source soon. Also preparing a Gsoc student for NAT64 work and also ftp-proxy forward support if done with NAT64. Finishing up some RFC security mitigations as well and hopefully add Layer 2 filtering before the next NetBSD release.

Concerning the manual, please can you give me few pointers there so I can add that to my task list.

> On 1 Apr 2025, at 12:28 PM, Greg Troxel <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
> I am running npf on many systems and in the process of setting up NAT on
> one npf system and converting a different-firewall system to npf.  As
> part of this I am having a number of minor issues and finding the
> documentation to be not clear enough.  This note is only about the meta
> issues.
> 
> I see that npf is simply in the NetBSD tree as if native, and not in
> external, in sys/net/npf and usr.sbin/npf and a few other places.  But,
> src/usr.bin/npf/README points to https://github.com/rmind/npf/ as
> upstream.  There are some recent commits, but it doesn't really seem
> actively maintained; there are only two newer than 3 years, and they
> looked pushed from NetBSD.
> 
> Do people believe that npf in NetBSD-current matches the github
> repository?
> 
> Asking if npf is any system other than NetBSD:
> 
>  It looks like it is in FreeBSD.  Do they view NetBSD or github as
>  upstream  or if we push changes to  github maybe that's a distinction
>  without a difference.
> 
>  I don't find it elsewhere.  (There was an April Fools announcement
>  that it was committed to OpenBSD, and it's coincidence that today is
>  April 1....)
> 
> 
> In addition to the man pages in NetBSD, similar content appears at
> 
>  https://rmind.github.io/npf/
> 
> but it's not entirely clear how that documentation relates to what is in
> NetBSD, or even if it's up to date with the npf repository on github.
> Ideally all such doc content would be part of npf, and installed in
> /usr/share/doc/npf, so that it's available with the system, offline, at
> least to the extent that a user would benefit from reading it.
> 
> I find in NetBSD-current:
> 
>  ./lib/libnpf/libnpf.3
>  ./usr.sbin/npf/npfd/npfd.8
>  ./usr.sbin/npf/npf.7
>  ./usr.sbin/npf/npf-params.7
>  ./usr.sbin/npf/npfctl/npf.conf.5
>  ./usr.sbin/npf/npfctl/npfctl.8
>  ./share/man/man4/npflog.4
> 
> but


Emmanuel