gagath’s debian devlog

ITP: kanata

After having successfully packaged QMK, I just have created an ITP: kanata bug on wnpp.

Indeed, carrying a QMK-enabled keyboard with you at all times might not be practical when on the go with a laptop. Since laptop keyboards are (usually) dumb and not reprogrammable using QMK, kanata becomes the next best thing to bring ergonomy and keyboard layers using software remapping.

I am using the Arsenik bindings as they provide great reduced strain by limiting the movement of the fingers.

Security

The software basically acts as a keylogger and can remap everything. Users of kanata usually seem to run it as root or with mimimum considerations regarding safety. Packaging this software and boxing it as much as possible might actually increase security to its users, making sure that the "keylogger" is run in maximum possible insulation, especially:

No network access, shall the software go rogue and send keys to a server;
No filesystem write access, shall the software log keys to a file.

Dependencies

Kanata is written in Rust and has a quite reasonable dependency tree. Yet, all of the dependencies need to be packaged and having passed the NEW queue before the final software hits the archive.

Usually, the Rust team does not use ITP for its packaging work since this would likely spam the devel mailing list quite easily. However, I took the opportunity to create this ITP bug to signal intent and prevent duplicate work. Any helping hands are very welcome, especially to get the dependency tree in place.

For Arsenik, since it is mostly configuration files, users should be able to provide them to kanata as-is. Thus, no packaging of it is planned at the moment.

Happy typing.

gagath’s debian devlog

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