[Bug 476086] [NEW] gnome-settings-daemon has hardcoded syndaemon to excessively low value (.5 secs)

[frankr]

Public bug reported:

Binary package hint: firefox

In Karmic Koala 9.10, System->Preferences->Mouse dialog allows
specifying that the touchpad is to be disabled while typing, but doesn't
allow specifying for how long the touchpad should be disabled. The
disabling is performed by syndaemon, which has a default timeout value
of 2 secs. Some users may want more than 2 seconds (such as myself),
while Ubuntu has hardcoded the value to .5secs, which is so short as to
be worthless for many users:

http://git.gnome.org/cgit/gnome-settings-daemon/tree/plugins/mouse/gsd-
mouse-manager.c?id=46cfbb45bac09fd86f13a1995a4b4b2742b39c25#n498

User dissatisfied with this .5sec default are forced to start syndaemon
manually rather than using System'Preferences'Mouse.

What should be done is the following:
1) Have an advanced dialog associated with the "disable touchpad while typing" option in System'Preferences'Mouse. That advanced dialog should allow setting ALL of the options that syndaemon supports. Either go GUI or go command-line, but don't require users to sometimes use the command line because the GUI doesn't support everything. In particular, the GUI should support specifying the timeout interval. Use milliseconds rather than seconds, to avoid issues with radix indicator (period in English, comma in continental Europe). This is medium priority because touchpad issues tend to be extremely frustrating to beginning users who are migrating from Windows, to the point of turning them off of Ubuntu entirely. This is an easy fix and requires little testing and little danger of going wrong.

2) Enhance syndaemon to support disabling the touchpad entirely when an
alternate pointer device is attached (a mouse). This is how Windows
works. And then add an option for this to the System'Preferences'Mouse
dialog. I'm not sure how difficult this enhancement would be. Assuming
the touchpad timeout time can be raised to a much higher value than .5
seconds, then that is a workaround for being able to disable the
touchpad entirely when a mouse is attached.

** Affects: firefox (Ubuntu)
     Importance: Undecided
         Status: New


** Tags: syndaemon

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gnome-settings-daemon has hardcoded syndaemon to excessively low value (.5 secs)
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/476086
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