[PATCH weston 0/5] Touchpad support

[Peter Hutterer]

On Thu, May 10, 2012 at 07:13:09PM +0100, Daniel Stone wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> On 10 May 2012 17:45, Christopher James Halse Rogers
> <christopher.halse.rogers at canonical.com> wrote:
> > Is Weston going to essentially fold in all the interesting bits from all
> > the input DDXs to the core (and require this to be duplicated in all
> > other compositors), or should these conceptually be modules, eventually
> > crystallising as an input-module ABI compositors could share?
> 
> Kinda.  You really want to share stuff like touchpad processing (like
> how xf86-input-synaptics is a generic evdev processor for touchpads,
> but not half as terrible), but a lot of it involves gesture processing
> and similar, to the point where you'd almost have to build another
> input API.  And that's not really something I want to do.

fwiw, I've looked at moving xf86-input-synaptics to be shared by X and
weston and I think it's quite possible. it requires some work to synaptics
that consists of just one tasks to make the driver usable as libtouchpad (or
whatever you want to call it for weston) - to sepaate the X APIs from the
core driver.

It is  is something I've started but I keep getting preempted by bugs to
fix. But in the end the driver itself isn't that X specific (evdev in,
xf86Post* out). and it's something I want to do anyway to have the driver
work with automatic testing frameworks.

And yeah, I agree that synaptics is messy. But that largely comes from years
of quirky hardware and neglect of maintainer time. Writing it from scratch
IMO just means you'll be likely to duplicate the bugs we've fixed over the
years and still end up with largely messy code anyway.
I'd rather have that energy focused on cleaning up synaptics and making it
usable from two systems.

Cheers,
  Peter

> Food for thought though.  I'd definitely like to see the input stuff
> in Weston kept as separate as we can make it without bending over
> backwards and causing mass annoyance to everyone, to see what falls
> out.  The long-term goal of sharing this kind of thing with other
> compositors (and even X) is definitely worthwhile.