[Fingerforce-devel] Debian patches for ThinkFinger (was Re: How to manage Debian specific patches)

[Luca Capello]

Hello Justin!

Please don't discuss issues different than the subject or, at least,
change it.  Done with this mail.

On Wed, 24 Oct 2007 01:06:06 +0200, Justin Dugger wrote:
> On 10/23/07, Luca Capello <luca at pca.it> wrote:
>> I need to apply a not-yet-included-upstream patch [1] to ThinkFinger.
[...]
> Is the team thinking of including the homedir patches?

I asked for an upstream advice about that on the reply to [1], but I
haven't had any reply yet, so I'll probably skip it.

> I've been avoiding that patch since I'm not clear on the
> ramifications of storing authentication data in a home dir, and I'm
> not sure what it fixes. I imagine NFS mounted home shares might hate
> it, who knows what else.

I don't remember if there was a real fix reason behind that patch, so
I cannot answer now about what that patch fixes.  However, the
direction is clearly the correct one for ThinkFinger or, better, for
the driver-agnostic fingerprint authentication PAM module.

> It seems like password hashes are stored in shadow with root
> permissions only and group shadow, but this might be because it
> stores all the passwords in one file.

I'm not sure this is a problem: the libpam-thinkfinger module tries to
access that file because the user has requested it (s/he's trying to
login).  If you're thinking about accessibility, well, I guess that if
anyone can read your home, that file wouldn't be your problem, then.

Thx, bye,
Gismo / Luca

Footnotes: 
[1] http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.drivers.thinkfinger/434/focus=468