Mouse and touchpad settings dialog layout

[Nick Schermer]

On Wed, May 25, 2011 at 2:42 PM, Guido Berhoerster <gber at opensuse.org> wrote:
> * Nick Schermer <nickschermer at gmail.com> [2011-05-25 07:45]:
>> On Wed, May 25, 2011 at 12:23 AM, Guido Berhoerster <gber at opensuse.org> wrote:
>> > * Nick Schermer <nickschermer at gmail.com> [2011-05-24 23:41]:
>> >> The nick/pointers branch is now functional. The wacom stylus settings
>> >> are not there yet, need to figure those out first, but the synaptics
>> >> tap/scroll and wacom rotation/mode are ready.
>> >
>> > Are you not abstracting those settings, will e.g. adding support
>> > for a different touchpad model require adding a new tab and
>> > collection of xfsettings?
>>
>> Well there are not a lot more drivers and yes, the settings in
>> xfce4-mouse-settings are driver-specific. However xfsettingsd supports
>> code for general device property storing (like xinput), so no changes
>> need to be made there.
>> That means it is also possible to set new properties with
>> xfconf-query, but in the dialog there is some driver specific code to
>> check for synaptic and wacom capabilities.
>>
>> That said, I'd be glad to support other touchpad/tablet/? drivers too,
>> but I doubt there are a lot of those out there (mainstream)? Another
>> option is a tool that allows to edit all properties for each device
>> (and store then in the correct channel so xfsettingsd restores them on
>> login).
>
> I don't know about tablets but I do have a Sentelic touchpad in my
> Netbook which is commonly used in MSI Notebooks/Netbooks (and
> their OEM variants). On Linux it has its own driver and needs to
> be configured through a separate tool. There is low level
> documentation available with the kernel
> (http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux-2.6.git;a=blob;f=Documentation/input/sentelic.txt)
> and the details about configuration can be extracted from the
> sources of the configuration tool available at
> http://fsp-lnxdrv.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/fsp-lnxdrv/trunk/src/

Looking at the code of the sf project and the data you've send me, the
device does not support device properties and only configuration
through sysfs. Controlling such devices will really be a _special_
case with separate functions to write to sysfs from xfconf and
personally I think if the hardware is taken seriously, in the end it
will get a driver with device properties.

I know the wacom and synaptics are special cases too, because of their
property names, but they all use the same code and because of those
names it is easy to detect which device is present. That wouldn't be
the case for the sentelic touchpad and I've read some discussion to
use synaptics for sentelic devices too, so I'm not in favor of adding
this to xfce4-settings.

Nick