It would be great if the OpenSC-GUI was available as a flatpak on flathub.org

[ieugen]

Hello,

Not all users are familiar with compiling applications.
On Linux distributing applications using native packages is hard since there are a lot of distributions to support.

One solution to that is to provide flatpak packages and distribute them on flathub.
By doing that the app is built on top of a runtime that is usually stable and you can focus only on your application and it's dependencies.
You could package the dependencies you need with the flatpack bundle.

The nice part is that OpenSC-GUI will work on all distributions.
It will also be sandboxed and more secure / midfull regarding user privacy.

https://flathub.org/
https://www.flatpak.org/

I hope you consider this,

Thanks,
Eugen

[mwallnoefer]

Hi Eugen,

many thanks for your very exhausting feature request. Of course it would be beneficial to OpenSC-GUI, but let me explain the history:

Ten to five years ago, OpenSC-GUI had been developed to incentivise the use of the national eGov services over the smart-card. This happened not only in Italy where the cards were called CNS, but also in countries like Estonia or Austria. With the advent of the tablets and smartphones, the use of plain smart-cards was not practicable any more. Finally, the OAuth-based successor called SPID made OpenSC-GUI pretty much abandonware. In recent years, I as a volunteer had done some little bug fixing and attempted a port to Qt5 since Qt4 became deprecated. The same holds for OpenSSL 1.0 versus 1.1.

So let me come to the conclusion: if you think that this software may be reused also in different circumstances please feel free to do it. I for myself will not be doing it since there is little gain for me, even the PIN changing part may nowadays be approached over the browser :|.

Matthias Wallnöfer

[ieugen]

I'm afraid it's beyond my technical skills.
I'm more into java part than native and native gui.
I think it still has value since.
I don't think smart cards will go away very soon.
They will merge with other technologies but right not I don't know a GUI to do basic card operations on Linux.

[mwallnoefer]

Let me clarify this since I guess that there is some misunderstanding between us. According to the project name OpenSC-GUI you think about a SW GUI which is able to perform such basic card operations. Unfortunately that is not the whole reality. Currently the tool is known to work exclusively with the Italian CNS distributed in the South Tyrol and the Trentino. Other CNS may do as well, but had not been tested yet.

What I wanted to point out is that we are far from having a generic GUI tool dealing with smart-cards of different kinds. That tool did not exist and it is very questionable if it will ever be there in the future, since it would be very complex.