Belpic 2.5.9

Yesterday evening, I noticed that the 2.5 release of support software for the Belgian electronic ID card had come out earlier this week (on 2006-07-04, to be exact). I didn't know, nor notice. Sigh.

I knew this release was forthcoming; I had been working with some Zetes developers on the code a few days last month, and they had implemented a number of my suggestions. Always nice to have a working relationship with your upstream. They hadn't implemented everything I had pointed them to (mainly due to lack of time because of a deadline they were running up against), but my suggestions had at least avoided some serious bugs that would otherwise have been in the release. Great improvement over the 2.4 release, which couldn't even be built due to a serious SNAFU in the code.

But, now, this isn't happening anymore. The only thing is that Zetes isn't the one doing official releases of the Belpic code; that honour is left to FEDICT. And while Zetes happily talks to me, I can't seem to get anyone inside FEDICT to talk to me. I've sent them some emails in the past, asking them some questions, but I've never had any of them reply to me.

Like I said: Sigh.

Oh well. So yesterday, late at night, I found out that the new release was out, and I promptly updated my packages. Err, well, at least, I almost did so. I actually postponed it to today, since, well, it was late already. And it is again, now, with my packages almost being finished; I had to redo some bits since, somehow, I seem to have lost my work of last month. Grmbl.

Anyway. The packages seem ready now. When I get home, I'll test them just one more time, and then they'll be ready for upload. Whoo!