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

[Andreas Henriksson]

Control: severity -1 wishlist

Hello Cesare Leonardi.

Thanks for your bug report.

On Wed, Aug 10, 2016 at 12:51:09AM +0200, Cesare Leonardi wrote:
> Package: kbd
> Version: 2.0.3-2
> Severity: normal
> 
> Upstream kbd provides a vlock binary but it's not included in the
> Debian package. Looking from Debian's changelog it's like that since
> february 2013.
> 
> I know that Debian already provides a separate vlock package (i use
> it), but it was last updated in 2014, it is currently orphaned and
> upstream source looks unreacheable (#833843).
> 
> In light of this, i wonder if the kbd's vlock inclusion could be
> reconsidered. I don't know if it could be taken as an entire substitute
> for the vlock package.


When I initially got involved in the kbd packaging in Debian this
was one of the things I looked into. I don't really see a problem
with shipping the kbd vlock program other than the "next generation"
vlock first needs to go away. IIRC the "next generation" vlock
has run pretty wild with features so even if it goes away it might
be that we need to ship one Debian release without any vlock before
we can reclaim the vlock binary name..... unless someone can come
up with a plan on how we can migrate from the current to the kbd vlock
without causing any problems for any configuration of the current
vlock users. Seems pretty unlikely anyone would go through all that
work....

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.

Since I personally have no real plans to do all this work I'll likely
tag this bug report somehow... not sure if wontfix or moreinfo is best.
This tag should not be considered a final decision, just a current
status. If someone does the work and lays out a plan on how we can
safely and debian-policy compliantly reintroduce the kbd vlock then
we could certainly just untag and proceed again.

> 
> Looks like Opensuse, Gentoo and Ubuntu still carry a vlock package from
> the same source as Debian, while Fedora and Archlinux don't have it in
> their repository and use the one provided with kbd.

Thanks for this overview.....

Regards,
Andreas Henriksson