Re: xhotplugd -- project idea

[Ilya Konstantinov <anon1@future.shiny.co.il>]

Hi Jim,

Here are my comments. Hope all this discussion doesn't end up in
all-talk-no-code. Seen one good discussion go that way already...

XFree-or-not
======
For things like changing the mouse protocol or tablet support on the
fly, implementing the support inside XFree86's code seems reasonable,
since this stuff is XFree86 specific anyway.

What's about:
- Keyboard model reconfiguration (XKB) ?
- Application invocation on plugging in new devices ?

No reason to lock down users into XFree86 for this. Linux can also
display into a remote X display, and there are other X servers too.

Files or sockets
========

I preferred stat()ing a file because it allows X sessions to "poll" for
new devices -- so that /sbin/hotplug wouldn't need to think "How do I
find all X sessions which are running on this machine? Where are those
little notification sockets which every X session has opened for me?".

Having something like /var/run/hotplug-sockets/ containing sockets of
all X session looked much messier and error-prone to me than a single
/var/run/hotplug-state.xml.

Desktop environments or not
=============	
For the mouse / Xkb model switching functionality, an X-wide solution
looks smarter.
For custom application events / launching functionality, a desktop
environment specific solution seems a better idea because:
  1. Programs could get notifications in the desktop environment's
standard fashion, e.g. DCOP. Using ICE directly is unnecessarily
difficult. Forcing everyone to link with a special library which'll talk
ICE for them is a library overkill.
  2. Mostly users would want a GNOME photo app to launch on plugging
their camera when running GNOME, and a KDE photo app to launch when
running KDE, so there's little benefit in "unifying the
app-launching-on-event". Even the "New Hardware Was Found" dialogs would
be different.




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