[Development] Fixing input for eglfs and friends

[Girish Ramakrishnan]

Hi,

On Wed, May 23, 2012 at 11:33 PM, Jørgen Lind <jorgen.lind at nokia.com> wrote:
> I think we should focus on keeping eglfs as small as possible, but
> keeping the readability of the code, so that the entry level for "extending"
> eglfs will be low.
>

I think this is the first thing that needs to be discussed :-)

We have Qt running a wide variety of embedded hardware. You can see
the important boards that we work with here -
http://qt-project.org/wiki/Category:Devices. There's still many boards
that we haven't listed like tegra2 & 3, trimslice, cubovision,
sodevilles, snowball etc. (we are working on it)

Many of the boards require eglfs. Adding wayland support on these
boxes is not for mortals and is thus not an option for the foreseeable
future on any of these boards.

Many of the boards come with very specific rootfs/linux. It's hard to
install stuff on them. udev support is either there or not there. That
doesn't mean you cannot plug devices into them, you can. Just that
udev isn't compiled and installed on the bsp by default and it's a
non-trivial task to cross-compile all that stuff.

With the above in mind: we are approaching eglfs as a proper qpa
plugin that needs to be productized for the embedded community. It
needs to work out of the box. With that in mind, I have added many
features to configure and eglfs. Specific to eglfs: I have added board
specific initialization hooks, added gl cursor support. Hardware
cursor support for the raspberry pi is on it's way which is going to
complicate eglfs further (the change is on my dashboard). We want
eglfs to be meaningful out of the box and not require us to provide
arcane arguments like -plugin EvdevKeyboard. And definitely not,
-plugin EvdevKeyboard:/dev/input/event0 in the absence of udev.

So, that's the background.

We can either fork eglfs for our use into another plugin. OR we can
continue to work on eglfs to make it more meaningful. I am fine either
way. Since you guys are the initial authors of eglfs, I will let you
guys decide. If you like, I can create a "example" qpa plugin like
minimal under plugins/platforms/example and remove all the hooks stuff
etc.

Girish