X11 SummaSketch Driver?

[Peter Hutterer]

On Wed, May 11, 2011 at 04:06:05PM -0400, Adam Jackson wrote:
> On Wed, 2011-05-11 at 21:30 +0200, Dan wrote:
> > Ahoy,
> > 
> > is there a way I can contribute to bring the X11 SummaSketch driver 
> > package back to life?
> 
> Start by getting it to build against a recent X server.  It's been
> formally unmaintained upstream since February 2009:
> 
> http://cgit.freedesktop.org/xorg/driver/xf86-input-summa

I just looked through the history of this driver. The latest commit that I
can find that _may_ be an actual fix to the driver (as opposed to general
autotool and misc fixes applied to all drivers in unison) is
d7b1d0dbf923 on 25 Nov 2003. But tbh that looks like a generic fix as well, so
you hit the first revision, the xfree86 import, from 14 Nov 2003.
There's strong evidence that this driver hasn't been tested since, at least
not by the developers. 
It was deactivated over 2 years ago upstream and shortly thereafter removed
from Fedora. IIRC, I couldn't find any real bugreports for summa in either
the fd.o nor the Fedora bugzilla.

Did you actually use this driver in the past?

> You can probably crib from the evdev driver changelog to see what API
> changes you need to adapt to.  But I believe the long-term goal is to
> move input drivers into the kernel as evdev sources, as much as
> possible, and let the evdev X driver pick up the simple ones
> automatically.  (Complicated things like wacom and synaptics keeping
> their own drivers, but still eating evdev events from the kernel.)

indeed. X input drivers are just feature-sets these days, no real drivers
anymore. And these feature sets are overlapping enough that we don't need
different drivers for different hardware.

Try to make the kernel handle the device and let evdev do the rest. the
protocol is documented in xf86Summa.c and looks reasonable simple on a first
glance, so transferring that into a kernel driver should be possible.

Cheers,
  Peter