[ubuntu-x] evtouch, evdev and natty

[Chase Douglas]

On 04/06/2011 11:09 AM, TImo Aaltonen wrote:
> On 06.04.2011 17:46, franck wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> I've seen on launchpad that starting from natty, evtouch will be removed and 
>> we should use evdev instead for touchscreen.
>> I've checked all around, experimented a bit but never found anything related 
>> to extended touch feature using evdev like simulated right-click.
>> Where evtouch is features rich for touch experience customization, evdev seems 
>> to offer only the basic left-click feature.
>>
>> Am I missing something?
>> I currently use a tablet this is my main problem when I tried natty.
> 
> Evtouch has been unmaintained for a number of years now, that's the
> reason it got removed. There is no upstream to report bugs to, and evdev
> has largely replaced it's functionality anyway.
> 
> "Rich touch experience customization" sounds like gestures to me.
> Probably not best handled by the driver but higher up in the stack.

I'll second this assessment. Any time you have timing involved to
perform an action, like a hold to perform a right click instead of a
left click, things get very dicey in the X input module area. X
synaptics does a lot of stuff like this, and even there we see issues
now that we have features like kinetic scrolling. Such event handling
really needs to be performed on the client side of X.

I hope that in 11.10 we will be able to add some of these types of
gestures to the toolkits. That will help resolve these issues in a
manner that does not pose corner cases or erratic behavior.

Thanks,

-- Chase