MainInclusionReportMouseemu

Main Inclusion Report for sourcepackage

Requirements

  1. Availability: http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/pool/universe/m/mouseemu, available for all supported architectures

  2. Rationale:

    • intel-mac-support requires this for handling of middle- and right-click on systems with single-button mice. Hitherto (on powerpc) this has been handled by means of a sysctl, but this is not available on x86 systems and its time had come anyway. This package implements a userspace replacement for that sysctl.

    • The plan is to install this package by default on Macintosh systems, both Intel and PowerPC. By way of risk reduction, I do not propose to install it automatically on upgrades.

  3. Security:

    • No CVE entries.

    • No Secunia history.

    • mouseemu runs as root, as a daemon.
    • Does not open any port.
    • Source code review:
      • No dynamic memory allocations.
      • No unsafe sprintf operations.

      • Does not open untrusted files.
  4. Quality assurance:

    • Package works out of the box without configuration.
      • ColinWatson has taken steps to make it use defaults that match those previously set for the mac_hid sysctl.

    • Package does not ask any debconf questions.
    • No showstopper Debian bugs. (At the time of writing, there are two open normal bugs, #304734 and #407725, both of which are fixed in the Ubuntu package.)

    • Good maintenance in Debian.

    • The original upstream maintainer cannot maintain it any more.

    • Does not deal with exotic hardware which we cannot support.
    • The worst that can happen if this goes wrong is that your keyboard and mouse stop working. mouseemu tries to defend against this happening due to crashes using a monitor parent process. The code that handles individual events is quite simple, and the patched source is about 20KB; the only bug with these symptoms that I (ColinWatson) have found so far happened immediately on startup on affected systems, and is now fixed. I have not found any crash-type bugs to date.

  5. Standards compliance:

    • Meets the FHS, Debian Policy

    • Standard debhelper packaging, standard dpatch system.
  6. Dependencies:

    • All in main.

Reviewers

MartinPitt: approved, but needs init script LSBification

MainInclusionReportMouseemu (last edited 2008-08-06 16:34:41 by localhost)