xserver: intention of tablet support in x11-input.fdi?

[Magnus Vigerlöf]

Hello,

I'm wondering about the 'FIXME: Support tablets too.' line in 
xserver/config/x11-input.fdi. What are the thoughts around this support?

I'm wondering because I'm working on adding hotplug support to the wacom 
driver and know that the configuration of these devices are not a simple 1:1 
mapping of hardware into InputDevices.

Stylus, eraser, keys, mouse are all reported through a single kernel device, 
and on top of that it is also possible to divide the tablet into separate 
sections that are translated into different InputDevices inside the driver as 
well. These are all defined as separate InputDevices in the configuration 
file today.

So I'm curious of how advanced these rules can be; Is it possible to add 
information that will make it possible to define several InputDevices for one 
kernel device? Is this a smart thing to do?

On top of that the applications that uses these InputDevices directly 
identifies them by their name, so this is probably something that has to be 
remembered on a per-user basis. There's also something that is quite 
impossible to know automatically, some of the stylus/eraser/... can have 
serial id's and this way we can support several different styluses/... on the 
same tablet. Naturally we want these to be mapped into different InputDevices 
as well.

So.. With all these parameter to take into consideration, what would your 
recommendation on how to handle the hotplug configuration be?

Is it easiest to block wacom devices from being automatically added and rely 
on another program to add/remove them as they are plugged/unplugged?

Cheers
  Magnus