Bug#622137: ITP: pvcam-dkms -- kernel module for Photometrics Coolsnap ES camera

[Bas Wijnen <wijnen@debian.org>]

Package: wnpp
Severity: wishlist
Owner: Bas Wijnen <wijnen@debian.org>

* Package name    : pvcam-dkms
  Version         : 4.1.0.
  Upstream Author : Bas Wijnen <wijnen@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.