Add Hardware Input Device for ACPI

[Richard Hughes]

On Sun, 2006-02-26 at 14:27 +0000, Matthew Garrett wrote:
> I still wonder whether the better approach would just be to make sure 
> that all these buttons generate events through the kernel input layer.

Yes you are correct, and I still think this is the *long term* plan.

It's going to take many months before all these changes to the kernel
are accepted, and rolled out to the stable kernel, and even longer
before a significant proportion of HAL users are using such new kernels.
I know some modules have external patches, but a few distro's stick to
stable with few patches, and would be unwilling to patch a large
proportion of acpi with new features.

I've found that kernel space moves slowly, and it's easier for HAL be
patched so that the hardware works "now". If you know of a big acpi
release with all the changes, tell me now, and save me a big lump of
time! :-)

Long term, when all the acpi modules have been reworked to use the input
layer, I agree this hardware input device can be removed. I don't see
this happening anytime soon tho.

Richard.