[RFC] Input design

[Daniel Stone]

On Fri, Apr 20, 2007 at 09:42:08AM +0930, Peter Hutterer wrote:
> so how do we specify "all devices"? This is non-trivial.
> The kernel puts all devices into /dev/input. that's nice, and we can  
> get hal to send us events when a new device comes in. However, this  
> falls short for at least two applications:
> - bluetooth mice connected with hidd don't cause hal events.
> this may be fixed in a newer release of hal (I'm still on dapper),  
> but it's annoying nevertheless. In the worst case, this could mean  
> that we can't enable bluetooth input devices because the server never  
> heard about it. this is...not good.

HAL bug. :)

> - there are devices out there that are prototype hacks
> physical devices (touch, pucks, visual recognition) usually have some  
> non-standard way to send events. One system we hacked up simply pipes  
> ps2 protocol into a named pipe. it never shows up as a device  
> anywhere. it's a hack but it works for what we need. requiring proper  
> kernel interaction for each new input device somebody comes up with  
> is limiting. [0]

Surely something like uinput isn't too onerous?  In any case, there
could still easily be manual config overrides: this is talking about the
zero-config case, and the interaction with client-side config managers,
if any.

> and in addition, if there's multiple servers running on one box  
> (multiseat comes to my mind), we have two definitions of "all devices"

Yep, this is the tricky bit.

> so in summary:
> we need a restriction to only allow "sane devices"

Indeed.  But you need this restriction _without_ HAL, anyway.  It's not
a solved problem yet.

> One thing I could imagine is - by default - don't allow anything  
> outside of /dev/input/ or HAL land. But you could explicitely state  
> in your config file that you DO want to allow other devices, maybe  
> with a regex to the possible paths. We then add new devices by  
> sending the path over the wire.

Well, my plan is to only have HAL-blessed input devices added by
default.  Anything else can come from the config file or command line.

Given that the multiuser case requires relatively complex configuration
now, this is not a regression.  Something like:
Section "InputDevice" # you have this anyway
    Driver  "evdev"
    Option  "Name" "Daniel's Mouse"
EndSection

Section "ServerFlags" # cry me a river
    Option  "FixedDeviceList"
EndSection

or:
Xomap -mouse /dev/input/whatever -fixeddevicelist

Cheers,
Daniel
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