[Fingerforce-devel] Fwd: Squeeze, fprint and fprintd

[David Jurenka]

Hi Dererk,
I wrote to you once already, more than a month ago (18/07/2010), in 
reply to your email “Ubuntu patches feedback?” addressed to me, but got 
no response whatsoever.
This time I'm writing in reaction to the message you just posted in the 
Fingerforce-devel mailing list; it might have contained a couple of 
inaccuracies I would like to clarify.

1. Libfprint and fprintd are API compatible and pretty much stabilized. 
Libfprint may have broken its API in the past, but that happened when it 
was under heavy development, i.e., a couple of years ago. Fprintd has 
been included in Fedora for a couple of releases now, and the API has 
been stable since then.

2. There is one fairly important application that uses fprintd, and this 
application is the GNOME desktop environment (since version 2.26)! If 
the daemon is running, GNOME About Me will automatically display a 
button leading to a dialogue where users can enroll their fingerprints. 
The fingerprints are then automatically used by gdm and 
gnome-screensaver, provided pam-fprintd.so is plugged into the PAM stack 
accordingly.

3. Fingerprint-gui (the DFSG non-free app you were referring to in your 
last email) does not depend or take advantage of fprintd in any sense. 
Quite on the contrary, fingerprint-gui provides an alternative to 
fprintd and its PAM module. It's based only on libfprint and libbsapi, 
the proprietary library by UPEK.

Should anyone want to test fprintd and check out its features, Debian 
packages have long been available at 
https://launchpad.net/~fingerprint/+archive/fprint (since about 
February). The libpam-fprintd package automatically sets the PAM stack 
to take advantage of the fingerprint authentication (using the 
pam-auth-update framework). Further details are at the above URL, 
including a detailed how-to and a list of known issues. Even though the 
instruction were written with Ubuntu releases in mind, the packages 
should be binary compatible with Debian Testing and Unstable, or they 
can be simply rebuilt from source if they aren't.

And Dererk, as I said in my last mail already, please feel free to take 
the packages and make use of them for Debian as you see fit.

Best regards,

David