Hi Pieter, On Tue, Dec 30, 2025 at 10:31:50AM +0100, Pieter Lenaerts wrote: > * Package name : eid-mw > Version : 5.1.27 > * URL : https://github.com/Fedict/eid-mw/ > * License : LGPL > Programming Lang: C, C++ > Description : Support for Belgian Electronic Identity Card > > Middleware software and viewer for the Belgian PKCS11 electronic > identity card. > [...] > Upstream, i.e. Belgian government, currently distributes Debian packages > via a separate repository.
Maintained (mostly) by me (and my colleagues). [...] > There may be reasons why this package has never been included in Debian. > If this discussion already took place in the past somewhere, I didn't > find it back. Therefore I think an ITP bug would be the right place to > document the reasons. The Belgian eID middleware used to be in Debian, maintained by yours truly: https://archive.debian.org/debian/pool/main/b/beid/ It was removed before I started working (as a contractor, at the time) for Fedict to help maintain the software upstream. There were two reasons for that, at the time: - For version 4, upstream had invested in a lot of Java infrastructure that became required for the beid packages. This meant I would've had to redo the packages from scratch, which I did not feel was worth my time. - There had been a few issues where newer eID cards required updates for the eID middleware, which meant that users using Debian stable who got new eID cards could not get it to work with what's in the archive. This caused support issues with Fedict/BOSA (i.e., the Belgian government). One of the first things I did when joining the eID team as a contractor was rewriting the eid-viewer (again) in C/C++ rather than Java. It was less of a hassle to run than Java-based applications (especially on macOS), and made the application integrate better in the relevant operating systems (as we used a system with a common backend and a per-OS UI). This resolved the first issue. However, the second issue is still there. When we moved from the older applet 1.7 eID cards with RSA keys to the newer applet 1.8 cards with NIST P-384 keys, the fact that the eID middleware was supplied by the government and *not* in Debian meant that we did not have any users who were confused about things not working in Debian (though I understand there were some users in other distributions that aren't officially supported where the problem did occur). While, ultimately, I can't prevent you from uploading things to Debian, because of the above issue, I would request that you don't. We do provide Debian packages, which we try to keep up-to-date and which we do test (for one, my laptop has the bleeding edge version installed at all time, and I use my eID card as an SSH key from time to time). Occasional infrastructure hickups aside, we usually have packages available for Debian within hours of the release being made public. Thanks for considering. -- w@uter.{be,co.za} wouter@{grep.be,fosdem.org,debian.org} I will have a Tin-Actinium-Potassium mixture, thanks.
