evdev is horrible and I can't get rid of it

[Jeffrey Baker]

On Sat, Mar 8, 2008 at 5:46 PM, Adam Jackson <ajax at redhat.com> wrote:
> On Sat, 2008-03-08 at 11:25 -0800, Jeffrey Baker wrote:
>  > I think all sane people could agree that evdev is terrible.  It makes
>  > your mouse not work right and the manual page is gibberish.  And yet,
>  > it's like the zombie xorg module that won't go away!  Even when I have
>  > Disable "evdev" in my Section "Module", somehow evdev still manages to
>  > load itself and ruin my pointing device.  Why is this?  Who thinks
>  > evdev is so awesome that it should override the user preferences
>  > against using it?
>
>  I actually just pushed a fairly substantial cleanup to the evdev driver
>  to git.  I'd appreciate any feedback on cases where it still doesn't
>  work.
>
>  I was motivated by much the same frustrations as you seem to have.  On
>  my machine, evdev 1.2 would find a bunch of devices, synthesize some
>  configuration for them, then fail to parse its own configuration.
>  Touching the touchpad made it crash.  And the config file syntax was
>  just insane.
>
>  The version in master, however, appears to work.

I built the git master of evdev and it does indeed look better.  My
big beef with 1.2.0 is there is no emulation of the middle button,
which appears to work in your latest code.  It's nice to be able to
paste :)  I'm not sure why but my Microsoft Natural Keyboard Elite is
now misconfigured.  I changed it in the GNOME control center to be
"evdev managed keyboard" and loaded the defaults.  The up arrow is
printing the screen, the Print key does nothing, and my compose key
(Menu) doesn't compose (it raises the menu instead).  Strangely all
the right codes are reported in xev.

-jwb