[PATCH 0/3] xfree86: Configure input devices by properties

[Michael Thayer]

Alan Coopersmith wrote:
> Dan Nicholson wrote:
>> True. The single file xorg.conf is not a lot of fun. To that end, I'm
>> also working on a patch to make an xorg configuration directory.
>> Something like /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/. 
> 
> I've thought of this before, especially since our old Xsun server had a
> similar concept of OS-provided default configuration, with a system-specific
> configuration file that just supplied the non-default settings - a bunch of
> stuff we have embedded in the C code is really default xorg.conf that could
> be in system provided conf files.
That sounds like a nice solution.  Most of the udev/hal/*Kit/whatever
gang also seem to have adopted this approach (as far as I can see, udev
has /lib/udev for default system settings files, and /etc/udev for user
overrides).  It would certainly keep my life easy, as I could just drop
my configuration files into whichever of /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d or
/lib/X11/xorg.conf.d seemed more appropriate.

>> The huge advantage of using
>> xorg.conf is that you and your users can be entirely ignorant of how
>> the event backend. Nobody enjoyed migrating their configurations to
>> hal (in fact many people are still fighting it), and hal is already
>> deprecated! At least on linux, the push is to get people off hal and
>> onto udev. Or maybe a new DeviceKit will show up. Or maybe on Solaris
>> they want to use a different mechanism. 
Indeed, after having migrated some other code I maintain to use libhal,
then to use hal directly via dbus after being told that libhal was
deprecated, I am also reluctant to move onto this week's "right way to
do things".  (I switched that code to read Linux sysfs directly with a
fallback to walking /dev and probing devices; the sad thing was that
this ugly approach is actually more readable than the hal variety was.)

Michael
-- 
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