[Fingerforce-devel] [Thinkfinger-devel] xscreensaver problem

[Luca Capello]

Hello!

Cc:ing the Debian FingerForce mailing list for obvious reasons
explained below.

On Tue, 18 Sep 2007 01:20:04 +0200, Justin Dugger wrote:
> I'm working on bringing thinkfinger into Ubuntu (Gutsy only
> currently).

Please read below.

> I thought I should point out that newer versions of Ubuntu rely on
> GNOME screensaver rather than xscreensaver.

This has nothing to do with the fact that xscreensaver is still widely
used.

> Xscreensaver is historically pretty secure, but not very flexible.
> http://www.jwz.org/xscreensaver/toolkits.html has more from the
> author of xscreensaver.  One of the things it does is attempt to
> "grab" the mouse and keyboard.  The critical part is at the end
> where he writes "Making the unlock dialog also be able to take
> advantage of accessibility tools is probably a lot harder."

Many thanks for the explanation and the link!  Now it's a bit more
clear why it's so difficult to have xscreensaver working with
thinkfinger.

> I'm personally not that paranoid about locking the screen, but I can
> see where others might care. To that end, please do report more
> progress on this (as it happens) -- at the moment GNOME screensaver
> doesn't seem to be working for me with thinkfinger, and I'd
> definitely like to know how similar problems were solved ;).

As explained at [1], gnome-screensaver should work with the patch
provided at [2].

> For the terminally curious, I've published the packages as:
> deb     http://ppa.launchpad.net/~jldugger/ubuntu gutsy main
> restricted universe multiverse

This is my main concern: if you had read the list archive, you'd know
that I was working on the Debian package, which is actually available
since Aug 12th in experimental [3] (the reason of that choice are
explained in the ITP [4]).  At the FingerForce mailing list you can
find my announce [5] to move thinkfinger from experimental to unstable
(and then testing and etch with a backport [6][7]), which will happen in the
next 20 days [8].

Yes, shame on me to not have reported this news previously on this
list, but the cause was mostly lack of time :-(

Since anyway Ubuntu is based on a snapshot of Debian sid, I don't see
the point in having two different packages, especially because the
Debian package should compile without any problem on Ubuntu (even with
the latest PAM-0.99.7.1).

I'm not offering myself as the Ubuntu maintainer, but I'm more than
open to solve any issue with the package.

Thx, bye,
Gismo / Luca

Footnotes: 
[1] http://article.gmane.org/gmane.linux.drivers.thinkfinger/385
[2] http://article.gmane.org/gmane.linux.drivers.thinkfinger/330
[3] http://packages.qa.debian.org/t/thinkfinger.html
[4] http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=409563
[5] http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/fingerforce-devel/2007-September/000007.html
[6] to have a backports available from [7] the package needs to be in
    testing
[7] http://www.backports.org
[8] 10 days in experimental with no bugs plus 10 days in unstable with
    no RC bugs before moving to testing