[Sugar-devel] Modern Linux trends

[Bernie Innocenti]

On Sun, 2010-04-25 at 18:54 -0400, C. Scott Ananian wrote:
> I am failing to resist responding to this troll.
> 
> Dbus access from the command line is fairly good, and NM supports a
> number of static data files for configuration if that's what you want
> yo do.  Fear not, scriptability of Unix systems is, if anything,
> *increasing*, as there are now powerful ways to get at the internals
> of most system software using things like gobject, which provide much
> more powerful mechanisms than simple pipes and getopt.

+1 Insightful.

You would have got a +1 Informative if you'd link to a nice tutorial.
I've always wanted to learn how to control things with dbus.


> Learn the new tools, you'll like them.  Arguing from the
> stuck-in-the-mud old fart perspective may be fun, but it's not
> constructive.

Bah, such a luddite! ;-)

I'll go back trying to get my scroll wheel emulation to work in my brand
new X 1.8. The old xorg.conf way was way too easy:

  Option "EmulateWheel" "1"
  Option "EmulateWheelButton" "2"

When static configuration files fell in disgrace, I figured out that I
could achieve the same functionality by means of this "simple" HAL fdi:

/etc/hal/fdi/policy/10-bernie.fdi:
 <?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>
 <deviceinfo version="0.2">
  <device>
    <match key="info.capabilities" contains="input.mouse">
      <merge key="input.x11_driver" type="string">mouse</merge>
      <match key="info.product" contains="TPPS/2 IBM TrackPoint">
        <merge key="input.x11_options.EmulateWheel" type="string">1</merge>
        <merge key="input.x11_options.EmulateWheelButton" type="string">2</merge>
      </match>
      <match key="/org/freedesktop/Hal/devices/computer:system.kernel.name" string="Linux">
        <merge key="input.x11_driver" type="string">evdev</merge>
      </match>
    </match>
  </device>
 </deviceinfo>


Now hal also fell in disgrace and devices are being configured directly
by udev. Being clueless, I asked my friends on #xorg-devel:

 <bernie>    whot: what's the udev equivalent of these hal rules for Xorg 1.8?
 <remi|work> bernie, we started writing an upgrade guide for our users with a couple examples : http://dev.gentoo.org/~scarabeus/xorg-server-1.8-upgrade-guide.xml
 <bernie>    remi|work: thanks!
 <dberkholz> remi|work: yeah, i guess we could reverse our old script that translated xorg.conf to fdi
 <dberkholz> wherever that thing ended up
 <remi|work> dberkholz, that script is dead, it relied on xf86config which can't be pulled easily from the server
 <dberkholz> it's been a while, but i thought we had figured out some way around that
 <remi|work> dberkholz, besides, I've never been a huge fan of that script. I think our users should know what they're doing
 <remi|work> so we're documenting it properly
 <dberkholz> i think knowing what you are doing is different from creating needless work
 <dberkholz> when will people ever need to repeat this task again? how is it a valuable skill?
 <remi|work> then let's not run the script by default
 <remi|work> if you create one...
 <remi|work> IMHO, trying to figure out how to parse HAL .fdi files isn't much fun.
 <remi|work> and given the complexity HAL files can reach, I don't think it'll work reliably
 <dberkholz> sigh. that dumb script was never written to actually understand the xml, just to output tags as raw text.

Eventually, I wrote this:

 Section "InputClass"
        Identifier "TPPS/2 IBM TrackPoint Wheel Emulation"
        Driver "evdev"

        Option "EmulateWheel"           "true"
        Option "EmulateWheelButton"     "2

        MatchProduct "TPPS/2 IBM TrackPoint"
 EndSection

Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to work. I'm not really sure what the
product string is supposed to be, and testing changes requires
restarting X.

Meanwhile, I'm typing two obscure xinput commands manually every time I
start my X server:

 xinput --set-int-prop 'TPPS/2 IBM TrackPoint' 'Evdev Wheel Emulation Button' 8 2
 xinput --set-int-prop 'TPPS/2 IBM TrackPoint' 'Evdev Wheel Emulation' 8 1

Ah, progress... why don't anyone just love it? Now you've got to be a
hacker with connections with the Xorg core developers in order to
configure your clit mouse on Linux!

-- 
   // Bernie Innocenti - http://codewiz.org/
 \X/  Sugar Labs       - http://sugarlabs.org/