HAL and INPUT

[Richard Hughes]

Guys,

What are we doing with HAL and INPUT? Currently HAL exposes buttons such
as LID with state and other buttons such as POWER without state.

With the new INPUT world-order, we will have several event devices that
can emit devices of different types.

If we are planning to support the new buttons produced by the likes of
thinkpad_acpi (where we can detect what buttons are attached, but can
remap them on the fly) then we need to make sane the HAL policy and keys
for this.

So we have:

* switches that have state like lid
* buttons that give out events
* keyboards that have to be remapped (kernel drivers included)

I think we need to decide what we need to do, as the current code in HAL
is hacky and really confusing as we are merging devices to computer and
creating other devices with different properties.

So I think, ideally we need to do:

* hardware remaping of keys using the keymap addon
* for each input device:
 - create a new individual hal device for any 'interesting' buttons and
launch an addon monitoring the event file.
 - and buttons that have state then merge in the extra properties

Or we can rip out all the input parts from HAL (but keep keymap) and
just reply on querying XOrg for buttons and state.

Comments please,

Richard.