On Wednesday 02 May 2007 23:13, Martin Paljak wrote: [...] > My question: Do you really want to talk to a reader ? Can't you > communicate with the reader via pcsc (SCardControl should do that)? [...] Basically you are right, and that's why Libchipcard is card-centered (it rarely exposes the reader).
The idea of Libchipcard was and still is to only say: "I want a card" without caring how it comes by and to later say "Select the file xxx and read the nth record of it" without having to deal with APDU variations among readers and cards (at least with ISO commands). However, currently there is no single API or interface which is used or understood by every application. So right now you need to use one interface for some tasks while you need some other interfaces for other tasks. I don't like this situation any more than you do, but that's how it is right now. In this situation I don't find it helpfull if any interface exclusively grabs all readers, thereby blocking any other interface. I know that at least the PC/SC developers want to keep it that way, but I still feel entitled to my own (in this case: different) opinion on that. That's why I changed Libchipcard's behaviour from the same excluding behaviour to a less aggressive one. [...] > I think it is because of a different reason: libchipcard seems to be > targeting German banking cards (and related secure readers) whereas > opensc is for card initalization as well as read only cards (like eID > cards) Different areas (cards), same problems (readers). [...] Right, Libchipcard is mainly used for banking and medical cards (the latter also with thin clients), so the API differs. However, both need an underlying IO layer, and both use their own... In general I don't have problems with having a variety of APIs (although one single API would greatly simplify the application programmers work) as long as none of them tries to bind the readers exclusively. Regards Martin -- "Things are only impossible until they're not" AqBanking - http://www.aqbanking.de/ LibChipcard - http://www.libchipcard.de/ _______________________________________________ opensc-devel mailing list opensc-devel@lists.opensc-project.org http://www.opensc-project.org/mailman/listinfo/opensc-devel
