Device capabilities / platform status service

[Ivan Čukić]

Hi all,

For the shell switching / capabilities-based component loading, we'll need to 
have the system to get the capabilities of UI devices (obviously :) ).

The service (guessing org.kde.platformstatus will fit this purpose) will need 
to be able to:
 - get the keyboard, attached/detached events
 - mouse/touchpad devices, --||--
 - touch-screen devices (don't think those can be turned on/off on a same 
screen, so we don't really need events for these)
 - screen resolution

It would be wise not to make this list extensive - we might need/want 
something else later which would change the api later.

Also, sometimes these will not be able to be retrieved. Resolving the problems 
regarding detection with a default value (can't detect keyboard -> no 
keyboard) might not be sufficient in some cases, so the presence will need not 
to be a simple bool, but a 3-value type - equivalent to option<bool>.

I've seen how to get most of these via xlib (haven't found this api in xcb; 
solid doesn't have api for this).

Since this will rely on xlib, it also will need to be abstracted out to be 
able to (1) support wayland protocol, (2) to have a fake backend for 
development and testing purposes.


Also, I have a question regarding the actual implementation of 
org.kde.platformstatus. Do we really need it to be a kded service since it 
needs to be tightly integrated into plasma (and deal with all async stuff), or 
we could just have it as a part of plasma binary, but expose via d-bus for 
other applications?


Cheerio,
Ivan


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