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

[Dererk]

On 20/08/10 16:42, David Jurenka wrote:
> 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.
Hi David!

Happy to hear from you, unfortunately I've never received such email
response (would you mind sending me on private the delivery-ID so I can
trace back whether/if my mailservers ack'ed reception on the first place?)

Unfortunately, We apparently disagree about what's stable, or anyhow, we
disagree about what's stable enough for Debian :-)
Basically, our mains concerns are found around the fprint PAM module
(libpam-fprint binary), as I wasn't aware there existed a fprintd PAM
implementation [happy to hear about it!], this was the main purpose the
whole fprint software existed on Debian for, doubting about it's
integrity made this decision difficult but straight forward.

Once again, and let me be clear about that I've nothing at all against
the Fedora folks, personally I don't find the inclusion of fprint
software on their releases to be a strength enough reason to change my
mind about admitting its stable enough under the eyes of Debian's
quality, I, on the other hand, see no other wide distribution to have
released with it integrated too by default.
I'm not saying it crashes all the time and that its a pain in the ass to
use it, on the contrary, I use it myself on my thinkpad daily to
reinforce my password'ed auths.

I'm very happy to hear about the Gnome case!
Although I'm not a Gnome user myself, I would love to see it integrated
it too in the near future. Unfortunately this wont be seen in Squeeze
archive either, but will be working to have it integrated for future
releases, as with the udeb's packages we are preparing for the next
release as well.

Thanks about the fingerprint-gui clarification, I surely must have
confused them.



Greetings,

Dererk

-- 
BOFH excuse #412:
Radial Telemetry Infiltration


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