Beid updates

There've been some posts on Planet Grep about using the Belgian electronic ID card in Ubuntu, recently. As the one who's responsible for making that possible, I felt I had to comment.

First, yes, it's possible to do crypto stuff with plain OpenSC rather than the belpic-patched versions; in fact, the tools required to sign plain text files aren't shipped anymore as part of belpic since (I believe) version 2.5.9, which is currently in Debian. However, if you're going to write your own software that somehow uses the eID, I strongly recommend you use the beid-patched versions, since they have support for a feature of which I can't remember the name currently but which means that you need to send your PIN to the card on every signature operation; plain OpenSC is not aware of this possiblity, so does not have support for it, may end up in a confused state when the card refuses to sign, and you may end up locking your card if you keep going on. You have been warned.

Second, there is a README.Debian file in libbeidlibopensc2 which explains some of the idiosynchracies in the packaging, and tells you which packages you need and which ones you don't. If you're interested in using the eID, I suggest you read it.

Finally, I'm currently working on packages of 2.6.0, which was released on 2007-08-30. They're mostly ready; I have a rather large changelog currently and a two-item TODO list—one of which reads "test&upload"; if all goes well, I should be able to upload them this weekend. Occasionally, this upload includes a small patch that was communicated to me through some mandriva developer which will make one of the aforementioned idiosynchracies—the fact that you have to install the -dev packages if you want to use the mozilla plugin—obsolete.