Desperately need the elographics input driver back.

[Peter Hutterer]

On Wed, Jun 02, 2010 at 12:04:57PM +0200, Bernhard Prell wrote:
> I am completely new to this list and want to apologize if I violate some 
> written or unwritten law (list etiquette) but I am under great (time)
> pressure.

you don't violate any implicit laws, don't worry.
 
> Today I updated a linux installation to xorg 1.7 (the distribution is gentoo 
> btw.) and was confronted with a message that support for the elographics 
> driver was dropped. 

are you sure you're talking about elographics here? it's one of the few
input drivers that's half-maintained. it's being kept buildable and even saw
some real changes more-or-less recently. It certainly builds, git master
does so anyway. It's overdue for a release though so maybe that's the issue
here?

> I tried to find out more and read on an OpenSolaris page 
> that no one in the world is interested in this anymore and that there are no 
> maintainers for it. First let me say that you can still easily buy touch- 
> controllers and touch-monitors from Elotouch that need this driver. And the 
> company that I work for still builds kiosk-like systems with this touch-
> controller and will do so for at least the next five years...
> 
> I would be very thankful if someone who has the knowledge to work in the 
> necessary ABI-changes to make this driver work again could do it. I would need 
> it so desperately that I would even try to do it myself, but of course I know 
> absolutly nothing about xorg-driver-development and it probably would take me 
> ages to get into it. 
> 
> I already tricked the gentoo installer so that it tries to compile the driver. 
> It says: 
> 
> xf86Elo.c: In function 'xf86EloControl':                                                                            
> xf86Elo.c:800: warning: passing argument 3 of 'InitButtonClassDeviceStruct' 
> from incompatible pointer type          
> xf86Elo.c:800: error: too few arguments to function 
> 'InitButtonClassDeviceStruct'                                   
> xf86Elo.c:824: warning: passing argument 3 of 'InitValuatorClassDeviceStruct' 
> makes pointer from integer without a cast                                                                                                                 
> xf86Elo.c:824: error: too few arguments to function 
> 'InitValuatorClassDeviceStruct'                                 
> xf86Elo.c:833: error: too few arguments to function 'InitValuatorAxisStruct'                                        
> xf86Elo.c:837: error: too few arguments to function 'InitValuatorAxisStruct'
> 
> Maybe someone can supply me with a working xf86Elo.c or can point me to a 
> person I can ask, or point me to a document where I can find the information 
> to fix it myself (quickly). If I should become the maintainer of the driver 
> because nobody else wants to do it, who should I "inquire" to :-) ?

me. more or less :)

the reason we deprecated a bunch of input drivers is twofold - one is that
most of these devices are well supported by the (Linux) kernel now and don't
have a need for a specific X driver.
the other reason is that we don't have hardware to test these drivers so
beyond build testing there's not much we can do.

anyway. as I said, elographics seems to be building fine from git but we'd
still welcome a new maintainer. it's not a lot of work, anytime the API
changes we update the mouse, keyboard, evdev and synaptics drivers and the
patches are usually quite easy to port to elographics.
so if you're interested in that, let me know in private and I'll give you a
run-down of what's needed.

Cheers,
  Peter