Package: wnpp Severity: wishlist Owner: Bas Wijnen <wij...@debian.org>
* Package name : pvcam-dkms Version : 4.1.0. Upstream Author : Bas Wijnen <wij...@debian.org> * URL : None yet, hopefully soon on http://alioth.debian.org. * License : GPL Programming Lang: C Description : kernel module for Photometrics Coolsnap ES camera Photometrics/Roper Scientific is the producer of the Coolsnap ES camera for scientific measurements. They provide an unsupported driver for GNU/Linux, consisting of a closed-source library and source for a kernel module. The module doesn't compile on modern kernels, so I fixed it and maintain the fixed version. I have also written some tools to make use of the library. An overview: - The kernel module is free and maintained by me. It has an interface which is only documented by its source. Since the only user of the module is the library, it should be considered an undocumented interface. This makes the module suitable for contrib. - The library which they provide as a binary. It is broken because it doesn't have a SONAME and includes libm, but it does work. This obviously has to go into non-free. This library is like many C libraries: the program needs to take many steps even to do simple things. - Because of this I wrote a daemon which allows simple commands to just work. This daemon uses a public interface to applications which want to do measurements. I may also write a different back-end at some point, which uses any video4linux(2) device instead of the Coolsnap. Even better would be to change the kernel module to turn the camera into a v4l device itself, but that doesn't seem feasable at the moment. - While the daemon is controlled over a textual interface through a network port, which makes it very suitable for scripting, I also wrote a simple graphical program to use it. At the moment I don't have a license to distribute the library, but they do have it available on their website. Until I get a license (I don't think they'll have a problem with that, they don't have a "don't distribute" license, they simply have no license at all), I can let the postinst download the file and install it. This ITP is about the kernel module. I'll file separate reports for the library and the tools. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-wnpp-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20110410143611.2672.52696.reportbug@localhost.localdomain
