[PATCH synaptics] conf: rename to 70-synaptics.conf

Stefan Dirsch sndirsch at suse.de
Fri May 20 13:25:34 UTC 2016


On Fri, May 20, 2016 at 12:20:02PM +0200, Hans de Goede wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> On 19-05-16 17:35, Stefan Dirsch wrote:
> >Bump up synaptics driver to 70, so it get's perferred over libipnut,
> >which was dropped down to 60. Reason is, that synaptics driver is more
> >of an additional driver, which then should be installed if installed.
> >
> >Similar to what was done for wacom configuration file.
> >
> >https://bugzilla.suse.com/show_bug.cgi?id=979554
> >
> >Signed-off-by: Stefan Dirsch <sndirsch at suse.de>
> 
> The difference is that the wacom driver provides a whole bunch of
> functionality over libinput (*), where as the synaptics driver is mostly
> just an old crufty driver which we want to get rid of.
> 
> So NACK, we really want people to switch to libinput for touchpads.
> 
> If there is any reason why a user cannot switch please ask the user to file a
> bug against libinput directly at bugzilla.freedesktop.org, at a minimum we
> should be able to explain to the user why he cannot have his pony (e.g.
> some weird synaptics specific behavior which we deem undesirable) and in
> many cases users complaints are valid and we've been able to fix them
> by improving libinput's touchpad behavior, without introducing the need
> to tweak a config file to their desire as people have typically been
> doing with synaptics.
> 
> By making libinput's touchpad support just work we can greatly improve
> the touchpad experience under Linux, instead of people having to do
> dark magic in their synaptics-config to get things to work to their
> liking.
> 
> Ugh, just looked at the bug, I see that the user wants circular
> scrolling on a Dell Latitude E6510, which has a perfectly normal
> rectangular touchpad, so I'm afraid this one falls into the
> "cannot have his pony" category, even if we where to ever add
> support for this to libinput (unlikely since round touchpads
> have gone out of fashion a long time ago), we will likely not offer
> it on rectangular touchpads
> 
> So back to the patch, we want libinput to have a higher prio, as
> we want to move existing users over to synaptics, even they do a
> dist-upgrade from a previous distro release which had the synaptics
> driver. We cannot force uninstall the synaptics driver by say adding
> an Obsoletes to the libinput driver .spec file, because we still offer
> the synaptics driver for users who have a special case which is better
> served by synaptics. Given these conflicting desires, we require a
> bit of manual config from the special case users in the form of
> manually adding a config file to enable synaptics with a higher
> priority then libinput.
> 
> Looking at Suse bug I see that you've already made this proposed
> change in the suse pkgs, and also for evdev. What does this mean for
> users who have upgraded from older suse versions rather then done
> a fresh install? Will they somehow get the synaptics and evdev
> drivers uninstalled on upgrade ? If not I would advise you to
> undo this change, because evdev / synaptics support is likely
> to bitrot, both on the xorg side as well as wrt support by
> gnome/kde/xfce mouse/touchpad configuration panels, so IMHO
> you're doing users who are upgrading from one release to the
> next a disservice by keeping them on evdev / synaptics,
> or in some cases likely switching them back from libinput to
> evdev / synaptics when they get the updated packages with the
> higher prio for evdev / synaptics.

edev changes I've reverted (see my response to Peter's mail). I see that my
patch is not appreciated. ;-) I can and need to live with that. No issue. ;-)

My plan for SUSE is to no longer install the synatics driver by default, so
users setting up a new system will get libinput driver. For users updating
their system, synaptics driver won't get uninstalled and as a Linux
distributor I'm not interested in pissing them off by switching to a different
driver with a different feature set, so I need this higher priority for
synaptics. The same applies if somebody explicitely installs the synaptics
driver in addition. In that case he gets what he deserves, the synaptics
driver. ;-)

I agree, that we disagree here. ;-) We may get rid of synaptics driver rather
soon though. I'm going to help you to get there by encouraging users to report
the issues, they still see with libinput on bugs.freedesktop.org!

Thanks,
Stefan

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FAX: 0911-740 53 479          D-90409 Nürnberg
http://www.suse.de            Germany 
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