[ubuntu-x] UDS: Graphical Configuration Tool for Wacom Tablets & TabletPCs

Loïc Martin loic.martin3 at gmail.com
Thu Dec 11 18:07:25 GMT 2008


Bryce Harrington a écrit :
>> I've checked the xorg mailing lists archives for a few weeks, and
>> there's still no solution offered for the post-xorg.conf era.
> 
> Do you mean input-hotplug support in wacom-tools?  Yes I'd love to hear
> some plans upstream around that, and a rough idea of an ETA.
As far as I can tell, there's no plans and no ETA. The question will
have to be raised in xorg mailing list, I can try to poke their IRC
channel a bit (most of the replies will probably fly far above my head,
so IRC is a good start).

If by upstream you mean wacom, OTOH, they're still waiting for xorg to
decide what's the method going to be. Xorg was going to the HAL method,
but real life has invalidated that for wacom devices, even though they
haven't formally acknowledged the fact.

>> On another
>> note, if we're going to add all the options from
>> https://wiki.ubuntu.com/X/Blueprints/WacomTabletsUi in xorg.conf, the
>> file will get really big. Another approach is just creating the
>> necessary lines in xorg.conf, and keeping the options in a .wacomrc file
>> that the desktop would load at startup (so just xsetwacom lines), which
>> might be simpler (and quite easy for the user to understand + each user
>> can add its options/preferences without needing sudo rights - they'd
>> only be needed to add or remove wacom support in xorg.conf).
> 
> Does xsetwacom accept a .wacomrc file input currently?
> 
> Regardless, I think it's a good idea.  I don't care so much about
> xorg.conf becoming big, but the fewer times the user has to fiddle with
> xorg.conf as root, the fewer chances for the user to see bulletproof-x
> (or worse).  ;-)

xsetwacom doesn't have a specific configuration file. wacomcpl outputs
xsetwacom lines to ~.xinitrc, but that file isn't used in most modern
distributions (so wacomcpl users have to execute the file manually or
fiddle with their DE to execute it) and we'll get users playing with a
potentially troublesome file (also, some would go for a system-wide
xinitrc, creating some more bugs).

My personal suggestion is to just call the file .wacomrc, since even if
the user fiddles with it it won't affect anything else. Then we just
execute the file at session start (I use this method at the moment, I've
got a few scripts that I launch depending on the application and desktop
setup I want to use).

The only problem is that the devices won't have a fine configuration for
login, which can impacts TabletPC users and disabled users - but there
might be a way to get xsetwacom lines executed when X starts (if it's
not possible, xorg.conf has to contain everything).

Long-term, xorg.conf goes away, but xsetwacom won't - so the part of the
tool that uses .wacomrc (or any other script) will remain the same, and
educating users to look for a .wacomrc file isn't a bad thing. In the
event Xorg achieves input-hotplug for wacom devices, if we keep
everything in xorg.conf we'll have uneducated users, while else we'll
have them keep on using the same method (and the same configuration
files if they want to keep them).

> This is the same use case as applying xrandr settings during startup.
> So we should make sure to use the same approach for solving both.
> (E.g., an .xrandrrc file the desktop would load at startup).

So far so good if the method is successfully used already for xrandr
(that means my concerns for login are not founded).

I'm of the opinion that having a separate file from .xrandrrc would
cause less troubles - users fiddling with their wacom settings won't
mess with xrandr, and vice-versa. Users posting their custom wacom
configuration files is quite common, and making sure they only see
wacom-related lines it a good thing (compared to the mess custom
xorg.conf can become).

Loïc




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