Re: xhotplugd -- project idea

[<Jim.Gettys@hp.com>]

I've been out of touch, due to my mail being moved and Usenix...

As others have pointed out, it probably doesn't need to be a daemon
itself: but some mechanism needs building to decide if a new input
device should be handed off to the X server, and provide a gui to the
user the first time a new device is added so that they can decide if it
should be handed off.  

The X server can listen on a named pipe, or UNIX domain socket, or some 
similar mechanism for notification that it should start up a new device 
when hotplugged.  I'm not happy about stat'ing a file: the inner part 
of the X server is a "select" or "poll" operation, and adding another 
system call in the second most inner loop of the X server isn't in the 
cards.

I've been planning to do the X side of the equasion, to make X deal with 
the new input mechanism and update the XInput extension to support it.  
It has taken longer to get to it than I wanted, due to a longer recovery 
to surgery last year and some other distractions.  I hope to get started 
in the next few weeks (as soon as I finish up some GTK+ work I'm doing.)  
In the meanwhile, others can hack, and/or we can work on design (always 
a good idea).

And yes, this should be done without tying the hands of the desktop
environments...

				- Jim

--
Jim Gettys
Cambridge Research Laboratory
HP Labs, Hewlett-Packard Company
Jim.Gettys@hp.com


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