59 lines
2 KiB
Markdown
59 lines
2 KiB
Markdown
[[!meta title="Published gpm2"]]
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After a very long time I decided to give a rewrite of [[software/gpm]]
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a try.
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## Motivation
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The
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[recent discussion on the mailing list](http://lists.linux.it/pipermail/gpm/2010-May/thread.html)
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reminded me of one thing, since I overtook gpm maintenance:
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* There are a lot of problems with gpm
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Don't understand me wrong, gpm is a great software, knows how to handle
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a lot of mice and has many interesting programming techniques inside.
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To extend gpm or to debug it, is pretty hard, as the code is not easy
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to read nor to understand (though fun if you do).
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Some time ago I asked around in the world of BSDs, in the Linux kernel,
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what their preferred way would be to handle mice.
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As there have been almost no responses, it seems everybody does his
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own thing. I was also considering whether merging gpm into some
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"general input library" makes sense, but at the end of the day:
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I only care about mice.
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## Current situation
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So yesterday evening I began to hack a new version of gpm, [[software/gpm2]],
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which can show you some ps/2 mouse movements as of today.
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The concepts of gpm2 are quite different to those of gpm, especially that
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gpm2 itself **cannot**
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* decode mice protocols
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* draw a pointer
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Instead the idea of gpm2 is to have external programs do that and make
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gpm2d just an interface to access the various mice.
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The "special case" of drawing a pointer can be realised by writing a
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client that does only that particular job.
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## The future
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I am not sure whether to invest a lot of work into gpm2 or not.
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On the one hand I would be pretty happy to have a clean, portable
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mouse handling daemon on the other hand I am not sure whether there
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is really a need for it.
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In case you think there's a need for it, I would like you to drop me
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a mail to **nico-gpm2 () schottelius.org** and let me know what you
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think about the current design ideas.
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And if you like them very much, you're invited to port / rewrite
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mouse drivers for gpm2. ;-)
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[[!tag unix]]
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