61 lines
2.1 KiB
Markdown
61 lines
2.1 KiB
Markdown
[[!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]]
|