Wacom config hacks (was: An example of how things should *not* be done)

[Matthew Garrett]

On Wed, Apr 23, 2008 at 03:41:52AM -0700, Bryce Harrington wrote:

> No.  That bug was mostly cosmetic IMHO, aside from the .xsession-errors
> file growth in Kubuntu.  Note there were dozens of other similar bug
> reports that derived from this issue.  In fact, a lot of users confused
> the wacom errors in their Xorg logs for the cause of their (unrelated) X
> problems.  The bug that actually motivated this change was #83860 from
> Henrik Omma.  I talked with him at length about the pros/cons of this
> change, but given that the "fix" for tablets was an ugly hack, and that
> it was only needed for a small subset of tablet users anyway (who could
> still uncomment the entries in xorg.conf to enable it), and that it
> resulted in a completely unusuable Ubuntu for users needing accessible
> login, we decided it was better to go with the current approach.

The problem in this case is that there's no record of the discussion in 
question. Upstream asked for more information about the issue over a 
year ago, and it's clear that it's a gdm bug (I've changed the state of 
#83860, since there *wasn't* a fix released in gdm). Instead of fixing 
the problem, it was worked around in a way that reduces the 
functionality of the distribution. There's no record of why this 
decision was made, especially since upstream seem to be on record as 
being willing to fix it.

-- 
Matthew Garrett | mjg59 at srcf.ucam.org