wl_tablet specification draft

[Pekka Paalanen]

On Thu, 26 Jun 2014 18:45:07 -0700
Jason Gerecke <killertofu at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Thu, Jun 26, 2014 at 12:12 AM, Peter Hutterer
> <peter.hutterer at who-t.net> wrote:
> > On Thu, Jun 26, 2014 at 09:48:37AM +0300, Pekka Paalanen wrote:
> >> Hi,
> >>
> >> it seems you forgot to reply-to-all, so I have re-added everyone and
> >> not trimmed the quotation.
> >>
> >> On Wed, 25 Jun 2014 18:37:08 -0400
> >> Lyude <thatslyude at gmail.com> wrote:
> >>
> >> > On Wed, 2014-06-25 at 15:19 +0300, Pekka Paalanen wrote:
> >> > > On Tue, 24 Jun 2014 21:56:09 -0400
> >> > > Chandler Paul <thatslyude at gmail.com> wrote:
> >> > >
> >> > > > Hello! As you all know I've been working on adding drawing tablet
> >> > > > support to the Wayland protocol. Now that we've added support for
> >> > > > tablets to libinput, the next step is writing the actual protocol that
> >> > > > will be implemented by the compositor. Following this blurb is the
> >> > > > current draft of the tablet protocol we have. Feel free to critique it.
> >> > > >
> >> > > > Cheers,
> >> > > >         Lyude

...

> >> Does the tablet map to the screen in a way that you can use the tablet
> >> address any window on screen at any time like a touchscreen does, or
> >> would it be more appropriate to have the whole tablet surface assigned
> >> to "the current" window and let the client use the whole range of the
> >> tablet instead of just the sub-region determined by its window on
> >> screen? (That is probably a stupid question, but would have you
> >> considered if the latter way had any solid benefits?)
> >
> > GIMP used to/still has that feature, I don't know how common it's being used
> > (need to chase this up). We had that in the original draft but decided to
> > remove it from this version, it's something we can add later with little
> > changes.
> >
> > the common use-case right now is having the tablet mapped to either all
> > screens or a single screen.
> >
> I don't really have any information on how common its use is, though
> IIRC it isn't terribly usable unless you know to have xinput float the
> device so it stops controlling the pointer.

That is indeed a good question: when should the tablet device be
controlling the pointer object instead of the tablet object in Wayland?

For touchscreens, we have the convention that the touch device cannot
send any pointer events. Emulating a pointer via touch that also works
as a touch device at the same time is a can of worms I'm sure Peter
knows well (I don't, for me this is hearsay).


Thanks,
pq