[Xorg] Input device hotplug

[Egbert Eich]

Keith Packard writes:
 > 
 > Around 18 o'clock on Jul 2, Egbert Eich wrote:
 > 
 > > It depends on if you want to implement different system specific mechanisms
 > > into the clients by adding them to the toolkits or if you want to abstract
 > > away things from the clients (and the toolkits) by putting the system
 > > dependent  functionality into one central place (the Xserver) which exposes
 > > a uniform interface to its clients.
 > 
 > These aren't incompatible; the common interface for clients remain the X 
 > input extension.  

Right.

 > 
 > How the X server discovers available devices and collects data for and
 > about them will remain somewhat system dependent. The suggestion here is to
 > modify how the X server learns about devices; currently it's "magic", and
 > so desktop software has no standard way to fix or change the behaviour.

Right. Currently we are discussing two strategies:
1. Let the Xserver sit directly on top of the hw drivers and let it handle
   the system dependent pieces.
2. put the system dependent pieces into an independent process and create
   a unified protocol for communication between the Xserver and this process.

I was talking about something else: 
The Xclients will need to do device aquisition and configuration beyond
the capabilities of what the XInput extension can do today.
As I understood you you wanted to expose the interface for this to the
client in a system dependent way bypassing X.

 > 
 > We can either have the X server provide some new standard protocol for 
 > applications to configure the set of devices the X server should use, or 
 > we can just use the X protocol for that purpose.  Either is functionaly 
 > equivalent, I think both present similar security "challenges".  I think 
 > using the X protocol will be somewhat easier to implement and will 
 > trivially provide network transparency for this configuration.

OK, that makes sense. If you suggest a standardized (ie. system independent)
protocol for device configuration we are on the same page.
For the transport it makes sense to use the already existing X protocol.

 > 
 > That's just my first opinion though; it wouldn't take a lot of data to 
 > force this to be reevaluated...
 > 

True.

Egbert.