www.nico.schottelius.org/blog/gpm2-published.mdwn

[[!meta title="Published gpm2"]]

After a very long time I decided to give a rewrite of [[software/gpm]]
a try.

## Motivation

The
[recent discussion on the mailing list](http://lists.linux.it/pipermail/gpm/2010-May/thread.html)
reminded me of one thing, since I overtook gpm maintenance:

 * There are a lot of problems with gpm

Don't understand me wrong, gpm is a great software, knows how to handle
a lot of mice and has many interesting programming techniques inside.

To extend gpm or to debug it, is pretty hard, as the code is not easy
to read nor to understand (though fun if you do).

Some time ago I asked around in the world of BSDs, in the Linux kernel
and the xorg developers, what their preferred way would be to handle mice.

As there have been almost no responses, it seems everybody does his
own thing. I was also considering whether merging gpm into some
"general input library" makes sense, but at the end of the day:
I only care about mice.

## Current situation

So yesterday evening I began to hack a new version of gpm, [[software/gpm2]],
which can show you some ps/2 mouse movements as of today.

The concepts of gpm2 are quite different to those of gpm, especially that
gpm2 itself **cannot**

 * decode mice protocols
 * draw a pointer

Instead the idea of gpm2 is to have external programs do that and make
gpm2d just an interface to access the various mice.

The "special case" of drawing a pointer can be realised by writing a
gpm2 client that does only that particular job.

## The future

I am not sure whether to invest a lot of work into gpm2 or not.
On the one hand I would be pretty happy to have a clean, portable
mouse handling daemon on the other hand I am not sure whether there
is really a need for it. That said, it depends a lot on the feedback
I get from others.

In case you have an opinion regarding gpm2, think there's a need for it,
or totally disagree with me (or anything in between),
I would like you to drop a mail to the [[gpm mailinglist|software/gpm]]
and let me know what you think about gpm2.

And if you like them very much, you're invited to port or rewrite
mouse drivers for [[software/gpm2]]. ;-)

[[!tag unix]]