[Fingerforce-devel] Bug#502138: fprintd: changing back from ITP to RFP

[Luca Capello]

Hi Didier!

Adding the original ITPer to the Cc:.

On Mon, 14 May 2012 12:00:18 +0200, Didier 'OdyX' Raboud wrote:
> Le 22.02.2011 12:32, Luca Capello a écrit :
>> IMHO we should move away ASAP from libpam-fprint (deprecated) to fprintd
>> and then check if the libpam-fprint's bugs are still valid:
>
> Agreed.
>
> I have spent some time packaging fprintd for Debian, with (late)
> inspiration from David Jurenka's nice PPA packages [0]. This work can be
> seen at [1].

It seems that the FingerForce SVN repository is no more visible on
anonscm.debian.org, while it is still working on my local copy:
=====
luca at gismo:~/src/Debian/fingerforce(svn)[fingerforce:143]$ cat .svn/entries
10

dir
143
svn+ssh://svn.debian.org/svn/fingerforce
svn+ssh://svn.debian.org/svn/fingerforce

2010-05-10T02:43:50.842142Z
143
dererk-guest

f111ec0d-ca28-0410-9338-ffc5d71c0255

packages
dir

luca at gismo:~/src/Debian/fingerforce(svn)[fingerforce:143]$ 
=====

> Two patches are needed: one to put fprintd in /usr/sbin and the other
> one to fix a pam-fprintd.so segfault on machines without fingerprint
> reader (such as the virtual machine I was testing on).
>
> [0] https://launchpad.net/~fingerprint/+archive/fprint
> [1] http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=users/odyx-guest/fprintd.git
>
> I plan to upload the above (after push of the packaging to collab-maint)
> before the end of the week; I would of course welcome co-maintainers and
> any comments.

I would prefer to keep everything under the FingerForce umbrella (the
fact that this team is not in the form 'pkg-fingerprint' is an
unfortunate effect, I would be more than welcome to rename everything!)
and I am perfectly fine to move from SVN to Git.

However, some points:

- as I told you in Real Life™, how does today's fprint works WRT PAM
  modules, i.e. could you use *both* fingerprint and password
  authentication or should you still wait for fingerprint authentication
  to fail to enter the password?  This was the major problem I found
  when testing fprintd and it is IMHO a show-stopper.

- how does libpam-fprintd plays with fingerprint-gui (see #666990),
  given that the PAM configuration conflicts with it?

- overall, how well is fprintd integrated with the rest of the system?
  Please note that while fingerprint authentication is nice, it is in
  the end more problematic than useful (this is what I found out after
  having started with so much enthusiasm), especially considering how
  hardware upstream uses USB's VID/PID...

- I would use git-describe for the package version, see lua-ldap as an
  example.

- actually, I would completely rework the Git repository (again, see
  lua-ldap as an example), because:

  1) upstream uses Git as well, thus we should simply start from there

  2) please use tags, or, better, fully use git-buildpackage (with
     pristine-tar and so on)

Thx, bye,
Gismo / Luca
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