Smart card interface, OpenSC and OpenCT

[Laurent Pinchart]

Hi everybody,

I'm (slowly) working on getting the Belgian eID card supported as a mean of 
signing electronic data. My goal is to add signing support to my e-mail 
client (KMail).

After some experiments with a smart card reader, I wrote an OpenCT driver and 
was about to get my hands in the OpenSC code when I found out that GnuPG 
doesn't use OpenSC anymore.

Could anyone tell me why that decision has been made ? What's the official and 
prefered way to interface a smart card reader in GnuPG ? Is it PC/SC ? What 
about readers with a pin pad ?

Zetes (the company that developped the Belgian eID software) contributed 
LGPLed code to OpenSC to support the eID card. Should this code be ported to 
GnuPG ?

I have no prior experience with the GnuPG code base, and was under the 
impression that OpenSC was the defacto standard for smart card access under 
GNU/Linux. I'd be very grateful if any of you could give me some information 
to get all that clear in my mind.

Laurent Pinchart