[Xorg] Input device hotplug

[Egbert Eich]

Keith Packard writes:
 > 
 > Around 17 o'clock on Jun 28, Egbert Eich wrote:
 > 
 > > Having the discover mechanism live outside of the X server is only useful
 > > if it is generic to the system and not specific to X. Any program
 > > interested in input devices should be able to take advantage of its
 > > services.
 > 
 > The HAL mechanism should be able to manage the device discovery, and if 
 > that device is using the standard Linux input drivers, it should be easy 
 > to make the X server handle essentially any new device without new code.
 > 
 > The only X specific piece would be a connector that listened for HAL 
 > messages and converted them to the appropriate X protocol.  
 > 
 > The obvious alternative would be to embed that functionality into the X
 > server, but I can easily imagine wanting to control the policy and
 > management of those devices from user-mode, in which case we'd end up
 > adding lots of additional protocol or just do all of that in an X 
 > application.

We definitely need some agent that dispatches the input devices among
different user mode programs. Making this sit inside the Xserver would
bind it to a single X server which would make moving towards multi seat
capabilities even more difficult. 
I only would like to see this agent to be indepent of X. Also this begs
the question why this functionality could not be implemented directly into
HAL.

Egbert.