[Muscle] read card type information

[chrysn]

hello,

i've written some code to send "card inserted" / "card removed" events 
over the linux hardware abstraction layer (that which makes hardware 
play together nicely with the desktop), partially to get familiar with 
hal, partially looking forward to having card insertion handled like cd 
insertion in gnome (like "You've inserted a GPG smart card I have never 
seen. Do you want me to fetch the key from the URL specified?").

now one of my issues is detecting the type of smart card inserted. i've 
got three cards to "test" (meaning to insert; i'd rather not run unknown 
commands on them as breaking them might mean losing important keys), but 
the only way of distinguishing between them that i've seen from the 
PyCSC (yes, everything is in python) is reading their ATR id.

now my question is: is there a reliable way of telling which type of 
card a card is (ie, PGP card / bank card / ecard (austrian health 
system) /  whatever other card) without having to send commands special 
to the respective types that might potentially do bad things on other cards?

thanks in advance
chrysn

ps if you want to have a look at the code, it's in 
http://svn.amsuess.com/tools/hal/pcsc_hal_interface/, see README for 
installation instructions