Wine Joysticks, seeking a plan

[Henri Verbeet]

On 16 April 2015 at 16:06, Stefan Dösinger <stefandoesinger at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 04/16/15 15:49, Henri Verbeet wrote:
>> Arguably the way we talk to joysticks on Linux is just broken. I
>> think it really would make much more sense for joysticks to go
>> through X11 like every other input device. There may even be some
>> multiseat considerations somewhere in there as well.
> - From a design point of view yes, but are there any other Linux
> applications that do this? The few I have run either talk to /dev/js*
> or /dev/input/event*. I'm worried that we end up being the only
> application using a poorly tested codepath.
>
Yeah. I have the impression it's mostly a case of "Why fix something
if you can hack around it instead?", but it's true that in practice
you can't really use joysticks through X.

> This here makes me doubt that going through the X server is a good
> idea:
> http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/wayland-devel/2015-January/019462.html
> (without knowing who or how competent the author is)
You can consider Peter Hutterer pretty much authoritative when it
comes to X input. And yeah, it's probably one of those things that if
you want it fixed you have to fix it yourself.

It seems the main issue with placing the joystick driver in the
"graphics" driver (it's really more of a platform driver at this
point) would be OS X joystick support when using winex11.drv. One
option could perhaps be to share the OS X joystick code between
winemac.drv and winex11.drv with e.g. PARENTSRC, although arguably
that isn't exactly pretty either.