[HEADS UP] clutter-evdev is using libevdev

[Benjamin Tissoires]

On Mon, Sep 9, 2013 at 2:17 PM, Giovanni Campagna
<scampa.giovanni at gmail.com> wrote:
> 2013/9/9 Benjamin Tissoires <benjamin.tissoires at gmail.com>:
>> Hi Giovanni,
>>
>> On Mon, Sep 9, 2013 at 1:49 PM, Giovanni Campagna
>> <scampa.giovanni at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> Hello folks!
>>>
>>> I just wanted to tell you that the evdev backend of Clutter, which is
>>> at the heart of the gnome-shell input handling when running as a
>>> wayland compositor, is now using libevdev for reading the events.
>>> This also means that, if the API is broken, it would be helpful to
>>> know in advance. I'm subscribed to the input-tools list, so that
>>> should be enough.
>>>
>>
>> That's great. Thanks for sharing with us.
>>
>> I don't know if you saw, but the API is nearly ready to be marked as
>> stable[1]. Could you please have a look at the patch and share with us
>> if you like it or not?
>
> Cool to see the API will be stable, and thank you for providing
> compatibility through deprecations.
> I think the new naming scheme makes sense, by the way.

Ok, thanks :)

> It should be said, clutter-evdev doesn't implement a lot of the
> functionality evdev would allow for, so we're basically just calling
> next_event() and kernel_set_leds(). Also, we're using udev properties
> instead of testing the device bits, which I'm not sure is a good
> thing, but it seems to work.

I would say relying on the udev properties is currently just fine, and
is the best you can do for now.
I think that relying on the devices bits would infer both a great
complexity in your code, and also a duplication of the effort
regarding the discovery/handling of devices.

Maybe the assignments of the type of a device will be handled later in
libinputmapper (maintained by David Herrmann), but currently, udev is
the only place to have a comprehensive way of type assignments for the
devices.

Cheers,
Benjamin