compile problem synaptics driver against 6.8.99.15

[Mike A. Harris]

Christoph Brill wrote:
> I guess they could. I played with to provided Makefile to do that, but
> it didn't work that well. "Biggest" problem is, that you need the X.org
> SDK to build it.
> Sadly the license of synaptics is incompatible with X.org's and the
> original author(s) are unreachable to ask them for a license
> change :( So it will never get merged into X.org ...

My last recollection is that the authors were contacted, and
agreed to relicense it as MIT for inclusion in X.Org, but nobody
ever followed up on the matter to see it happen.

We ship the GPL'd module in separate rpm packaging currently,
and plan on splitting all modules into their own rpms for X11R7,
and I know various other distros plan on doing so also.  With
this type of setup, I'm not sure if it's worth the trouble to
integrate more drivers into the Xorg implementation, as they
are fairly easily maintained by external maintainers anyway.

If someone is still interested in seeing it merged though, we'll
need to see a volunteer highly motivated to see the process
through from start to finish, who will have to dig up the old
emails from the synaptics authors I suppose in mailing list
archives.  I don't remember which lists they were in, but I'd
search xfree86/xpert/devel/forum/etc at xfree86.org as well as
the various xorg lists.  Other X developers might have saved
the emails somewhere easier to get at too, which might help
any would-be volunteers get started.

Hope this helps...