Hello all, About every two years the same subject pops-up.
pcsc-lite has some infrastructural limitations, that cannot be easily fixed. it has no driver support environment, so writing new drivers is difficult. One round ended up with the development of competing project: OpenCT. I believe OpenCT developers done a great job in designing architecture more suitable for *NIX. In order to make the application API simple, thy chose implement proprietary interface. I believe the decision of the proprietary API was crucial. Maybe if the choice was PC/SC we could all have a better solution. Cryptographic devices usability is one of the major missing features in the free open source world. There are not too many people who have the skills to develop and maintain software in this subject. Looking at the state of OpenSC, OpenCT and pcsc-lite projects it is apparent that there is not enough resources to maintain a proper solution. OpenSC has no active maintainer, OpenCT also in similar state, pcsc-lite is maintained by one developer, but only one reader driver (CCID) is maintained, and it has at least two forks which are maintained by vendors. So on the 3rth time (in 6 years or so), someone recommended to join efforts and create good reader framework. In order not to repeat OpenCT mistake, this approach was conditioned in the cooperation of both pcsc-lite developers and OpenCT developers, in order to obsolete both when and if the new framework will be prove it-self. This can be accomplished and many open source projects gone through similar process. Without such agreement, the resources will be invested for nothing, and we end up with yet another framework. I also took on my-self most of the work, so that after the implementation the effort of maintaining the new framework should be not harder than current. Ludovic made it clear that he does not want to cooperate. So I guess the initiative is rejected and dropped. I have enough experience to know who many resources should be invested in pcsc-lite in order to make it right. And it is more than the resources required for a rewrite. I thank Ludovic and all other people for the discussion. I am considering, just for fun, to add slot event reporting into OpenCT and add PC/SC compliant interface that uses OpenCT API. It is not the framework I outlined, but it will take us much closer to what we need. Example: We have daemonless standalone PC/SC implementation. Until the next round... Cheers, Alon Bar-Lev _______________________________________________ opensc-devel mailing list [email protected] http://www.opensc-project.org/mailman/listinfo/opensc-devel
