[ubuntu-x] evtouch, evdev and natty

[Bryce Harrington]

On Wed, Apr 06, 2011 at 02:14:47PM -0400, Chase Douglas wrote:
> 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.

Timo and Chase, can you add a note to the release notes about this?

That could help head off future user confusion about -evtouch's
disappearance (and subsequent bug reports).  Maybe something about "Any
feature regression from -evtouch to -evdev should be filed as a bug
report."

Bryce