Comment on Wayland anti-FUD

[Pekka Paalanen]

On Wed, 16 May 2012 11:39:06 +1000
Peter Hutterer <peter.hutterer at who-t.net> wrote:

> On Sat, May 12, 2012 at 01:16:38PM +0300, Pekka Paalanen wrote:
> 
> [snip]
> 
...
> > You are right about input plugins, but there are couple things
> > that should make it not so bad:
> > - a majority of input devices are evdev, so we mostly need only
> > an evdev plugin
> 
> there are 3 X input drivers that matter to most people these days. evdev,
> synaptics and wacom. All three are evdev drivers on Linux. the reason we
> still have three of them is because the handling of the devices is complex -
> what you want from a touchpad is different than what you want from a
> keyboard.
> 
> you could bunch all of them up into a single driver and wayland doesn't have
> the client legacy that X has but what you'll end up doing is moving the
> touchpad/wacom-specific sections into the clients. and then you hope that
> all clients have the same setup because otherwise that software-emulated
> button on your touchpad won't work in some clients but will in others.
> 
> I suspect there will be a need for multiple plugins sooner or later, even if
> all of them speak evdev.

Thanks for clarifying that!

Multiple plugins, or an input library a little like what Mesa (or
Gallium3D) is with hw gfx drivers? In Wayland, all the ones you
mentioned would probably need to be supported in the core input
protocol, right? Could that serve as a model for a unified input
library API, too?

I'm not clearly seeing why you say the specifics would be moved into
clients, unless they want to bypass the server event filtering and use
raw Wayland input events (which we don't have yet, AFAIK).

> > - not all compositors need to talk to input devices directly,
> > others are just Wayland clients to another compositor.

Cheers,
pq