LCA: Rationalizing the wacom driver [LWN.net]

LCA: Rationalizing the wacom driver

Posted Feb 3, 2011 15:36 UTC (Thu) by DiegoCG (subscriber, #9198)
Parent article: LCA: Rationalizing the wacom driver

I'm confused. I use a wacom tablet (I'm not a graphic artist either - I use it instead of a mouse - I recommend trying it BTW), and I think the article got some things wrong - at least this part: "Surprisingly, the original vendor driver is still under development by Wacom".

The wacom Linux programmer (Ping Chen) seems to be contributing to Peter's driver, and the old wacom driver is no longer developed (last commit done 8 months ago): http://linuxwacom.git.sourceforge.net/git/gitweb.cgi?p=li...

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LCA: Rationalizing the wacom driver

Posted Feb 4, 2011 0:23 UTC (Fri) by whot (subscriber, #50317) [Link]

Correct, Ping contributes to the forked driver. In fact, all of Wacom's commits to the X driver so far come from Ping and given the number of commits that's actually quite an amount. It is fair to say that she's sacrificed a lot of her freetime for me to go at this development speed and I am very grateful for that.

Kernel backports are still being developed in the linuxwacom and the input-wacom tarballs (the latter is kernel patches + xf86-input-wacom-<newest>).
But Ping is also active pushing patches to upstream. Alas, this tends to take a backseat when it comes to pushing device support into linuxwacom/input-wacom backports for Wacom's customers. The Bamboos are the best example here, having support in the linuxwacom backports long before upstream got the patches. Funnily enough, IIRC both patchsets were written by community members which illustrates the need for a "kernel patches need to go to LKML" message.

Re:development
The last version announced on the lists is 0.8.8 in June 2010 which is later than the git repo for linuxwacom. I _think_ the git repo for linuxwacom was a once-off import that never actually replaced CVS but I can't prove that at this point since SF CVS is still offline. I do get irregular private emails from Ping where she mentions she is still working on linuxwacom, but tbh I've stopped checking linuxwacom's CVS a long time ago...

LCA: Rationalizing the wacom driver

Posted Feb 5, 2011 9:30 UTC (Sat) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link]

Not very important, but isn't Ping typically a male name in China? (The Ping I know is male at least :) ).

LCA: Rationalizing the wacom driver

Posted Feb 7, 2011 21:40 UTC (Mon) by whot (subscriber, #50317) [Link]

I can't comment on the "typically" part but the two Pings I've met in my life definitely wouldn't tick the same gender checkbox in a questionnaire :)