At 10:22 22.08.00, Vojtech Pavlik wrote:
>On Mon, Aug 21, 2000 at 08:34:01PM -0700, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> > > There is a push on to make ADB keyboards and mice go through the input
> > > layer in the PPC port, but no-one has explained to me what we would
> > > gain from that.
> >
> > Quite frankly, I think that input to a large degree was a thing where the
> > argument for it has gone away. I suspect the GGI people are the only ones
> > who _really_ feel they have to have it.
>
>Maybe. I personally never liked GGI much. In my opinion it was much too
>complex for a simple (and impossible with the graphics part of it, too),
>task.
>
>Well, even the X people seemed to like the input layer. I've discussed
>it with Jim Gettys for example and found out this is very similar to how
>he wanted the things to be when X was born.
>
>And game developers like it too, for example Sam Lantinga of Loki said
>something like (quotation far from exact) 'it's much easier to write
>input-related stuff in Linux than in Windows, I really enjoyed it'.
>
>And distribution makers like it. Once fully implemented, it could remove
>most of the huge 'select your mouse type and model' menus in the
>installers, a point where most users are perpetually making the wrong
>choice.
Yes, every PPC distribution maker I talked to liked it, and I guess the
benefits are even higher for distributions supporting multiple platforms.
>It's a level of abstraction that makes writing the low-level drivers
>easier. Makes the drivers shorter, too. Application writing easier. I
>believe that's good.
I wholeheartedly agree. Initially I entered this whole "input game" cause I
wanted to get rid of "I ruined my keyboard layout with tool xyz" reports on
PPC (not to talk about the "big USB disaster" in early 2.2) and took a look
at the "Linux keycodes" approach in usb/keybdev.c. But it soon appeared to
me that it would be just plain silly _not_ to use possibilities provided by
the input drivers.
- it factors out a lot of code (eg. it obsoletes adbmouse.c on PPC,
replaced with 5 lines of code)
- it's convenient for driver developers
- it's convenient for users (eg. one unified mouse protocol)
- it's very lightweight
Franz.
-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org
Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Wed Aug 23 2000 - 21:00:06 EST