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. 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. Cesare.
Hello Cesare Leonardi. Thanks for your bug report. 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. Thanks for this overview..... Regards, Andreas Henriksson
Hello again. I don't think the release team cares much about this issue. I'd say if the package has no maintainer, try the last few uploaders and maybe even check if you can find anyone using it or caring about it on debian-devel or possibly also debian-user. Please do feel free to send information on the subject to this bug report and use it for coordinating the effort. Please do direct your mails to the bug report rather than to me, so that the information gets properly/publicly archived. (I'll get a copy of it any way.) My (possibly incorrect) understanding is that Frank started the fork, rewrote it basically from scratch with a new design and many more features. Possibly instead of going back to kbd vlock someone should just pick up the maintenance of franks vlock implementation and ask kbd upstream to deprecate their implementation.... Regards, Andreas Henriksson
I'm very sorry, i didn't noticed that my reply was directed to you rather that the bug report. It's possible. In the meantime i've updated #833843, because i've found that Frank has a github page with a vlock repo, so i think it's the current home of the project. Thank you very much, Andreas, for your suggestions and considerations. Cesare.