Regarding GSoC, 2013

[Peter Hutterer]

On Fri, Apr 12, 2013 at 03:44:58PM +0530, Gursimran singh wrote:
> Hello introducing myself,
> 
> I'm Gursimran singh 4th year undergraduate at Thapar University, Patiala.
> I'm glad to hear that xorg is participating in GSoC. I had been
> contributing in ubuntu for about one and half years and trying to learn the
> internals of the package xserver-xorg-input-synaptics, despite only a few
> users in ubuntu contributing in this area. I have triaged and upstreamed
> bugs related to the package and (feels like) know the detailed
> artchitecture how the input subsystem fits in together with the linux
> kernel. Unfortunately I wasn't able to add some real code patches being
> novice (tried got stuck a couple of times) in this field. However now I
> have better know-how to code compiling and packaging and is all ready to
> experiment with X. I'm really passionate to learn the internals of X and
> later I would like to become a part of the awesome community of X
> developers and I think GSoC will help a lot in this regard.
> 
> Currently I would be glad to work on synaptics or some other driver if an
> idea can be opened from the ToDo..
> evdev: the evdev driver currently ignores joysticks altogether. It could be
> extended to work against such devices and auto-setup itself accordingly.

one of the issues we see with joysticks is that they have no clear mapping
to X's notion of pointers and keyboards. buttons on a joystick cannot easily
be mapped to other buttons since the mapping is not obvious. likewise, axes
are more likely to interfer than be useful. Sascha did a talk about the
joystick driver which I summarised here and it addresses these issues
http://who-t.blogspot.com.au/2012/10/the-xorg-joystick-driver-xf86-input.html

> evdev: evdev touchscreen support is still subpar to evtouch. One missing
> feature is a right-click emulation on long presses. This would be a quite
> trivial project.

third button emulation was added in Feb 2011.

> synaptics: coasting is a on/off state toggle. should be momentum-based
> instead.

friction costing was added to synaptics in July 2010 and it is, for better
or worse, enabled by default in the driver.

Cheers,
   Peter

> 
> I have full determination to work in X and would be thankful if community
> could suggest me how should I strengthen my application. I can try add some
> patches to bugs once the project finalizes. Thanks a lot.
> 
> Some wiki page that I have written
> https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DebuggingTouchpadDetection
> https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DebuggingTouchpadDetection/evtest
> https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DebuggingTouchpadDetection/xev
> 
> Blog
> http://simar-mohar.blogspot.in/
> 
> 
> Launchpad Details
> https://wiki.ubuntu.com/simar
> https://launchpad.net/~simar
> 
> 
> Bugs - https://bugs.launchpad.net/~simar
> Code - https://code.launchpad.net/~simar/+merges
> 
> -- 
> Warm Regards,
> Gursimran singh
> 4th year undergraduate,
> Department of Computer Science,
> Thapar university,
> Patiala.

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