Wine Joysticks, seeking a plan

[Aric Stewart]

Hi all,

Ok I sat down with Ken (the benefits of being in the same office) and after a lengthy discussion I have come to terms with how it may not be the most ideal plan to put the joystick driver into the graphics driver. However I am still of the strong opinion that we need some sort of better joystick architecture and I know Alexandre is also of the like mindset. 

This was discussed back on 2005 and I know there was also recent discussion around BSD that also involves this. I also have an itch to start to poke at xinput, but I have no interest in poking at xinput with the current way joysticks are handled.

When I was working on this driver thing Alexandre expressed he was pretty opposed to having a whole new set of platform specific wine drivers. (winejoystick_mac, winejoystick_linux, etc...) But if we at least did that we would reduce code duplication by not having the platform specific code duplicated in 2 (with xinput it would become 3) places and have it collected in one place. 

Now completely unresearched but it may be possible to make a single joystick driver, maybe replacing winejoystick.drv that would build only the platform code that is relevant. 

but before I do another big chunk of work I am seeking some community buy-in and not just discuss with with Alexandre. I understand if the USB driver path gets actually fleshed out and we try to support Joysticks via that then all this separate driver work would fall away and be replaced.

We of course need to make sure we come up with a plan that Alexandre will approve of.  Would a replacement winejoystick.drv that holds all the platform specific code be acceptable? Is there a case where we would want that driver to be able to build multiple platform code? Maybe Linux and Linux Input?  I will admit I am pretty ignorant of the Linux side of this whole situation.

Ideas? Comments?

thanks!
-aric