[Pkg-kbd-devel] Bug#833888: kbd: Consider including upstream vlock

[Andreas Henriksson]

Hello again.

On Wed, Aug 10, 2016 at 01:56:45PM +0200, Cesare Leonardi wrote:
> Hello Andreas and thank you for your detailed reply.
> 
> On 10/08/2016 09:07, Andreas Henriksson wrote:
> >I'd suggest first reaching out to people with potential interest
> >in the current vlock implementation and see if they have any
> >objections or suggestions.
> 
> I don't know who contact for this, perhaps the release team. Let's see.

I don't think the release team cares much about this issue.

I'd say if the package has no maintainer, try the last few uploaders and
maybe even check if you can find anyone using it or caring about it
on debian-devel or possibly also debian-user.

> 
> Anyhow i write here some more notes just to add details for whom will
> eventually decide about this.

Please do feel free to send information on the subject to this bug report
and use it for coordinating the effort.

Please do direct your mails to the bug report rather than to me, so that
the information gets properly/publicly archived. (I'll get a copy of it
any way.)

> From the man page and from "http://danlj.org/mkj/" can be seen that the
> initial vlock's author was Michael K. Johnson (Red Hat), then the development
> was taken by Frank Benkstein. Looking in the kbd's git repository, the kbd's
> implementation started in 2011 incorporating the source from Michael K.
> Johnson, who is still cited as its author in the man page:
> http://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man1/vlock.1.html
> In the kbd's git i cannot find reference to Frank Benkstein's work, so i
> assume that his work came after the fork.
> Frank Benkstein's site, that is still marked as the upstream vlock package
> repository, currently doesn't seem to exist anymore.
>
> The implementation from kbd has compatible options but has a subset of them.
> It seems to lack all the features related to plugins:
> - support for locking consoles from X;
> - support disabling SysRq while consoles are locked;
> - support for interact with screensaver.

My (possibly incorrect) understanding is that Frank started the fork,
rewrote it basically from scratch with a new design and many more features.

Possibly instead of going back to kbd vlock someone should just pick
up the maintenance of franks vlock implementation and ask kbd upstream
to deprecate their implementation....

Regards,
Andreas Henriksson