The db5.3 library is likely to go away after the Forky release cycle. In the netatalk package, this is currently a mandatory dependency, used to store the CNIDs for files on the AFP file system.

In upstream v4.3 of netatalk, an experimental sqlite3 CNID backend has been introduced, which can act as a drop-in replacement for the Berkeley DB backend. This backend will be built by the build system if the libsqlite3-dev package is installed. This can then be forced as the default runtime backend by passing "-Dwith-cnid-default-backend=sqlite" to meson.

In order to gracefully convert an existing deployment with the dbd backend to sqlite, the user currently has to run "dbd -f /path/to/volume" on each shared volume they have defined in afp.conf. While not a disaster if you don't run this command (the CNID database will gradually be recreated during runtime) I would like to recommend this steps to users who upgrade.