MPX merge coming up

Peter Hutterer peter at cs.unisa.edu.au
Thu May 8 18:57:27 PDT 2008


After over two years of development, MPX will be merged into master in the
week following the 25th of May.

Any yays and nays need to be expressed ASAP.

=== Stability ===
I'm using it on my laptop and on my box at home. Most of the recent patches
were cleanups, and I haven't had any issues with it. 
With the most recent patch to HW-render the cursor, I cannot tell the
difference between master and mpx.

== Schedule ==
daniel is working on an xkb cleanup right now. mpx will be merged into this
xkb cleanup, and the combination will be merged into master.

xkb-mpx merge to happen in the week of the 19th to 25th, drop onto master
after testing.

This includes changes to x11proto, xextproto, inputproto, libXi, libX11,
libXext, xinput, and xserver.

I also need to get a simple patch into libxcb. This must be done first, w/o
the libxcb patch I cannot merge.

== Changes and possible issues ==
If you only ever use one cursor and one keyboard focus, you should not notice
any differences. If you do, please file a bug.

The story is different for multiple input devices. Now, as far as I can tell
this is the first time ever anyone has had native support for multiple
independent input devices on the GUI. So a number of basic UI-paradigms just
curl up and weep when you start juggling three mice and four keyboards. 

I spent a lot of time trying to make the server behave well, even if the
application doesn't support multiple input devices. But, nothing is perfect
and there are some cases where the behaviour may seem weird. These behaviours
however should be deterministic and thus you can get used to them until the
applications are fixed up and actually support XI.

One thing that will get lost for the time being is support for tablets. Magnus
is working on that, and it may be in mpx before the merge happens.

== XI v2.0 ==
Due to the changes in server behaviour, XI will be bumped to v2.0. XI 1 is
still supported, albeit the server does some tricks here to not screw up your
settings.

Any comments - please put them forward NOW before it is too late! 

Cheers,
  Peter



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