On Wed, Dec 16, 2015 at 05:31:30PM +0100, Stefan Sperling wrote:
On Wed, Dec 16, 2015 at 04:11:21PM +0000, Tati Chevron wrote:
>So I believe this work is important.
I think it's much more important to look at the impact on existing use cases,
before making changes and introducing a lot of new code that the end user
can't easily disable, and potentially affects such basic things as a mouse.
Your use case is as much important to me as it is to you.
I also prefer keyboards for development and will still be using
mice and touchpads.
I'd like to run OpenBSD on a tablet to *use a tablet*.
And I don't want to use a tablet running an OS I don't trust.
Yes, if I was using a tablet at all, I'd want to use it with OpenBSD.
But I don't see that touch-based devices are ever going to become the most
common devices to run OpenBSD, that's not realistic. Even ignoring servers and
headless devices, and only counting devices that are used interactively in some
way, I just don't see tablet devices becoming the most widely used.
To have any value, a touch screen needs to be the only input device. A desktop
or laptop with a physical keyboard doesn't benefit at all from replacing the
mouse or trackpad with a touch screen that needs anything that we don't already
support, it's just cumbersome. Only on devices such as tablets where _all_
input including keyboard input is done by touch, does it make sense to be
interpreting these multi-touch gestures, pressure sensitivity and other funky
things that go beyond what a mouse can do.
Since it's a niche area at best, why does it have to be integrated into the
same mouse driver that everybody else uses? I don't want to suddenly find
pointing devices such as trackpads behaving differently after an upgrade,
because the funky hardware that I and many other people were happily using as a
simple mouse, suddenly became, 'supported', and now responds to other things,
with no easy way to disable that.
There is a precedent for this: the OpenBSD text console supports full colour
operation when using pccon as a terminal emulation, and aside from a few bugs,
it has done for many releases. But we've defaulted to vt220, because that's
the lowest common denominator. Anybody who wants to change it and use the
enhanced functionality is free to do so. But we set sane defaults that work
for the majority of people. Pointing devices should be the same. Few people
want or need anything more than a PS/2 or USB mouse emulation, even if their
hardware supports it. It's just not necessary for server admin, development or
99% of what people use OpenBSD for. Why should we all change just so that
those who want an OpenBSD web browser on a tablet can use the touchscreen by
default? It goes against the normal way of doing things.
--
Tati Chevron
Perl and FORTRAN specialist.
SWABSIT development and migration department.
http://www.swabsit.com
