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

[Didier 'OdyX' Raboud]

Hi Luca,

Le 14.05.2012 12:35, Luca Capello a écrit :
> It seems that the FingerForce SVN repository is no more visible on
> anonscm.debian.org, while it is still working on my local copy:

I don't mind to use SVN; it's just not really straightforward to see
where and how one can.

>> 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.

Actually, the repository has Maintainer set as FingerForce, myself as
uploader. VCS is IMHO implementation detail.

> - 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.

This is addressed by upstream's pam/README:

> * pam_fprintd doesn't support entering either the password or a
>   fingerprint, as pam_thinkfinger does, because it's a gross hack,
>   and could be fixed by having the login managers run 2 separate PAM
>   stacks

So although this might be seen as a showstopper, it is considered by
upstream as a responsibility of pam, not pam_*.

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

No idea, as I haven't tried. That said, I guess they would probably
conflict (Breaks:) as providing the same functionality and using the
same libfprint backend.

> - overall, how well is fprintd integrated with the rest of the system?

Gnome is supposed to have fprintd integration since 2.26 and is reported
to work nicely in Gnome3:

https://nfolamp.wordpress.com/2011/06/24/fedora-15-enabling-the-fingerprint-reader/

>   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 think it would be good to have a packaged way to experiment that;
maybe we should target experimental instead.

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

Agreed.

> - 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

That's what is done; see upstream branch which is the master branch from
http://cgit.freedesktop.org/libfprint/fprintd.

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

I had forgotten to push the tags, now done. I have also pushed a
pristine-tar branch.

Cheers,

OdyX

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