[ubuntu-x] evtouch, evdev and natty

[Chase Douglas]

On 04/06/2011 03:30 PM, Bryce Harrington wrote:
> 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."

Good idea. I added a blurb.

Thanks,

-- Chase