Re: RFC: making the aiptek.c tablet driver xf86-input-wacom compatible

[Peter Hutterer <peter.hutterer@who-t.net>]

On Wed, Jun 26, 2013 at 10:17:30AM +0200, Benjamin Tissoires wrote:
> Hi Stephan,
> 
> On Wed, Jun 26, 2013 at 12:02 AM, Stefan Brüns
> <stefan.bruens@rwth-aachen.de> wrote:
> > Hi everyone,
> >
> > I have started to modify the aiptek tablet driver to be compatible with the
> > xf86-input-wacom driver.
> >
> > Motivation:
> > First, as wacom dominates the market, most configuration frontends are for
> > wacom, desktop integration only exists for wacom, and most application
> > developers only test with wacom tablets.
> > Second, the xf86-input-aiptek driver seems to be unmaintained, at least
> > opensuse has dropped it from distribution, and xf86-input-evdev is no
> > sufficient replacement.
> 
> Yes the fact is that xf86-input-aiptek is unmaintained due to lack of
> testers with the device. xf86-input-evdev is not a sufficient
> replacement because it aims at forwarding the raw events from the
> kernel without any processing. For tablets, the de facto natural way
> is to use the wacom driver, which should be called now "tablet" but is
> still called "wacom" for historical reasons.

fwiw, wacom is still very much centered around wacom devices. it will work
from a technical perspective with any tablet but there may be the odd thing
here and there that may look different. we'll have to fix that up as we go
in the X driver, but there are already non-wacom tablets that work fine.

specifically, test your tablet with libwacom as well (or the GNOME stack) as
this covers parts of the device-specific client stack for tablets.
 
> > So for me there are two possibilities, either replicating all the work done
> > for the wacom driver in the xorg stack and above, or just making the the
> > aiptek driver mimic the output of the wacom kernel driver - I have taken the
> > second option.
> 
> thanks for choosing the second solution :) I think Peter will join me
> on this thank you.

yes, indeed. less xorg drivers is the future :)

Cheers,
   Peter

> I just gave a quick look at the xf86-input-aiptek sources, and there
> is nothing which prevents you to port this device to the wacom driver.
> 
> >
> > Currently, I am cleaning up my changes, and I am investigating some bugs in
> > the original driver parsing the reports from the device.
> 
> The device seems to be a HID declared one. I'd be curious to have a
> look at the report descriptors to know if the parsing is really
> necessary. The reports descriptor can be retrieved by calling "lsusb
> -v" when the device is not bound to its usb driver.
> 
> >
> > I have tested my Aiptek 6000U with the xf86-input-wacom driver, and it is
> > working fine in Krita, Inkscape and The Gimp, configuring the tablet via
> > kcm_wacomtablet (KDE configuration module).
> 
> great!
> 
> >
> > If anyone is interested, I will send my patches to this list after the
> > cleanup.
> 
> I think we are. And I think you will also get some advantages in
> pushing those patches upstream so you will not have to manually
> maintain your own branch :)
> 
> Cheers,
> Benjamin
> 
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