What to do with potential workflow-changing / breaking changes - the other way around

[Fabian Vogt]

Hi,

FYI following.

in openSUSE xf86-input-evdev is still installed by default (and takes precedence)
as is xf86-input-synaptics for touchpads. This was not always the case, but we
quickly fixed that after we realized what happened (I did so immediately as my
touchpad did not behave correctly anymore).

The default in the distro was flipped due to GNOME 3.20 *only* supporting libinput,
while for KDE it still kinda worked, so nobody complained and QA still passed.

Another reason why it might've gone unnoticed for a while: libinput is supported
(even required) on wayland, so it's (for those not familiar with the input stack
details) a bit surprising that it does not work as well in X.org.
I assumed, as an example, that libinput's interface is backwards-compatible to
evdev, but obviously it was not...

IMO libinput for x11 is just useless as it's worse in every way for users and
devs (changed behaviour for 0 benefits). Using it for wayland compositors is
a different thing and I'm sure that it fulfills a use case there.

Cheers,
Fabian

Am Montag, 27. M?rz 2017, 17:38:14 CEST schrieb Martin Gr??lin:
> Hi distros,
> 
> today the same thread the other way around. We are currently seeing many 
> users complaining about mouse acceleration settings being broken. This 
> is because some distributions switched to xorg-libinput by default and 
> that is no longer compatible to our code. (See for example 
> https://www.reddit.com/r/kde/comments/61owi7/kde_ships_beta_of_kde_applications_1704/dfghmq0/ 
> )
> 
> We simply didn't expect any major breakage on the x11 stack and focused 
> on Wayland. Due to that the input module supports Wayland (through 
> libinput), but only xorg core and fails for xorg-libinput (oh the 
> irony).
> 
> If distros would have told us let's say half a year prior to the change 
> we would have been able to schedule some resources on it and ensure that 
> it continues to work. Even better would have been a pre announcement way 
> before we started to work on the Wayland part so that we could have 
> designed the code to support all three xorg-core, xorg-libinput and 
> Wayland. Now it's difficult.
> 
> So in general: please pre-announce major stack transitions which could 
> break our code. We all look bad if things break.
> 
> Cheers
> Martin
>