[Kde-hardware-devel] KDE's libsolid

[Alex Fiestas]

On Thursday, May 31, 2012 10:03:41 PM Pascal Fleury wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> As pointed out by Kevin, I ask for further information on this mailing list.
> 
> I was wanting to add better support for Jog/Shuttle devices (input devices
> like this one <http://retail.contourdesign.com/?/products/23> that I own)
> and was considering adding this as a new type of device to KDE's Solid
> library, to increase support across many programs that may use them. Here
> is my proposal:
> 
> 1. Add a new device type and Interface to the Solid frontend. This would
> let Solid notify about such a device being plugged in, and give some
> information about it (#buttons, jog resolution, shuttle min/max values,
> product name and device name).
We don't have any interface for input devices, in case we decide to go and add 
one for Job/Shuttle we should add interfaces for other kind such 
mouse/keyboard/touchpads/wacoms...

> 2. Add a new udevdevice so that the USB device can be detected at least on
> Linux. I know too little about other OSs that Solid runs on.

> As pointed out by Kevin, actually listening to events and dealing with
> input from the device's interaction would be done externally to Solid.
This needs patching in Qt, some effort is going on to supoprt *any* kind of 
input for shortcuts as well of supporting any kind of input.

> Is such a proposal something you would consider at all ? Also, I have no
> creds in submitting code to KDE, I have submitted improvements on the
> support of such devices to Kdenlive.
The rule for adding new interfaces is as follows:
We shall add a new interface if and only if more than one application is 
interested on it.

So, that's the first question I'd like to ask you: Do you think that 
applications should be aware that a Jog/Shuttle is present? can you tell us 
some examples?

> In case you think it's worth it, how/where would information be stored
> about the devices themselves? As it turns out, one can only know that it is
> a JogShuttle device from the USB VendorID and ProductID, and I guess there
> is no means to get the device to tell us about its capabilities, so that it
> would have to be stored in some kind of profile database that would have
> the info about #buttons, ranges of jog and shuttle etc.
This sounds like something that should go to either Kernel or X11.