Re: synaptics vs libinput and GNOME 3.20 no longer supporting synaptics
On Mon, 11 Jul 2016, Emilio Pozuelo Monfort wrote:
> > Looking at https://anonscm.debian.org/cgit/pkg-xorg/debian/xorg.git I see
> > that we have unreleased changes to not install the synaptics driver by
> > default. Timo or Emilio, can you upload those changes?
>
> That would break non-GNOME installations as you said. We should find a good
> solution before breaking more stuff.
Well, if some KDE/XFCE/etc. packages work only with synaptics and not with
libinput, then we should get those packages updated to depend on
xserver-xorg-input-synaptics, no?
This seems a better course of action than keeping a broken GNOME. In that
regard, having explicit dependencies seems better than keeping the
problematic dependency on xserver-xorg-input-all.
> Please no.
[...]
> Not that either.
Unless someone volunteers to create the patch that bring synaptics support
back, we must find some solution that covers at least the most common case
of having a single desktop installed and having it work as expected.
The suggestions I made fulfill that criteria, so can you elaborate on why
you don't want any of the above?
Also they could be temporary stop-gap measures until someone implements
something better... the "keep things broken until someone is annoyed
enough to work on a proper fix" is not a policy that we should use.
We're annoyed when upstream do that on us, why should we do the same with
our users?
> We thought about backporting synaptics support back for Stretch, to give more
> time to libinput to mature and to other DEs to add support for it. Not sure how
> much work that would be though.
Trying to identify relevant upstream commits on gnome-settings-daemon:
https://git.gnome.org/browse/gnome-settings-daemon/commit/?id=66c211ff24bec6a938d6a6a0dd8730f4689ef383
https://git.gnome.org/browse/gnome-settings-daemon/commit/?id=9287ef9ac5b119abdcbbabd920c19f353e577f90
Possibly also this one although that feature seems not important:
https://git.gnome.org/browse/gnome-settings-daemon/commit/?id=c50ceb880e928506d987747f9e554079ad3d9826
All lead to https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=759595 which
indicates that *BSD are invited to revert the patch to properly support
synaptics/evdev. So maybe it's not too hard to revert for us as well?
In control-center, we have the following relevant commits:
https://git.gnome.org/browse/gnome-control-center/commit/?h=gnome-3-20&id=ce48b5c6594ad450bbfee526683fe19efffe9ef3
https://git.gnome.org/browse/gnome-control-center/commit/?h=gnome-3-20&id=796e3fba9ed206e6570d3b38e3b81cf096851568
I expect those revert patches to require some regular work going forward...
I'm starting now to prepare updated packages with the above changes
reverted... just to see how hard it is and whether it seems to work.
> The other good option I can think of is to make GNOME prefer libinput by passing
> some options to X through gdm. No idea how feasible that is.
Looking at xorg.conf(5) it seems that "-configdir" or "-config" are parsed
before /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d which thus would not make it possible
to inject additional configuration for this. And I believe that the X
options are common to all sessions anyway so it would require some ugly
hacks AFAIK.
Cheers,
--
Raphaël Hertzog ◈ Debian Developer
Support Debian LTS: http://www.freexian.com/services/debian-lts.html
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