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

[Justin Dugger]

> On Tue, 18 Sep 2007 01:20:04 +0200, Justin Dugger wrote:
> > 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].

Thank you for that bit of history, it should come in handy to fix some
things.  I should have searched the list a bit more before writing
that.

> > 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].

Well this is good news. I should have pointed out that the package
I've published is largely based on the Debian experimental package.
Unfortunately, it's basically too late to bring this into Ubuntu's
upcoming release, so for now I'm just publishing in a PPA, and future
releases should pull your work in automatically.

While I am aware of the FingerForce team, I wasn't aware FingerForce
had a mailing list -- I had attempted to contact the two people listed
in the wiki a few weeks ago, but one address bounced.  I should
probably subscribe to this list if I intend to do any further work.
You might consider updating the wiki to reflect the existence of the
mailing list.

> 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).

And that it does.  Thanks for the work, it's quite handy.  The only
change I made was a patch/hack to change the prompt.  This is likely a
question for a new thread, but -- does the prompt "Password or scan
finger:" make sense to anyone else? At least for me, I can't seem to
get it to actually accept a password at that prompt.

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

Well, I'll be glad to work with the Debian team in the future to
improve things.  It'll be landing in universe, so there won't be
"maintainers" per se, but I'm thinking I'll give it the attention it
needs.  At the very least, this should reduce the maintenance burden
on people in Ubuntu following the adhoc guide in our wiki.

Justin Dugger

> 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
>