Bug 98536

Summary:	RFE: Ignore tablet puck after a timeout
Product:	Wayland	Reporter:	Peter Hutterer <peter.hutterer>
Component:	libinput	Assignee:	Wayland bug list <wayland-bugs>
Status:	RESOLVED WONTFIX	QA Contact:
Severity:	normal
Priority:	medium	CC:	killertofu, peter.hutterer, pinglinux, skomra
Version:	unspecified
Hardware:	Other
OS:	All
Whiteboard:
i915 platform:		i915 features:

Description Peter Hutterer 2016-11-01 22:52:52 UTC

From https://sourceforge.net/p/linuxwacom/mailman/message/35458797/
"Cursor (puck) tools tend to be left on the sensor, preventing us from
being able to rely solely on proximity information to determine if
they are being actively used. In the past we've used the amount of time
since the last event as an indicator of activity and allowed other
devices to grab control of the pointer if more than 100 milliseconds had
elapsed since the cursor's last event. Although this seems to work well,
there is another indicator of activity which should not be ignored:
button state. If a user is pressing a button on their cursor tool, it
should be considered active even if the 100ms timeout has been exceeded.
Not doing so could potentially allow another tool to grab "active"
status and have our driver send a button-up message and stop an in-
progress drag."

This is for a wacom driver specific fix, but the feature to force pucks out of proximity is currently missing from libinput.

Comment 1 Peter Hutterer 2017-03-17 01:46:08 UTC

side-note: this requires a kernel driver that does *not* do touch arbitration

Comment 2 Peter Hutterer 2017-05-17 03:48:30 UTC

CC-ing more wacom devs in case they find time to work on this :)

Comment 3 Peter Hutterer 2017-05-31 04:48:36 UTC

Closing as WONTFIX, mostly because I don't think it's worth the effort.

Wacom still provides the puck/lens cursor as additional device, but they aren't shipped by default anymore with the tablets. Touch is available on most (all?) modern tablets now and it's a useful alternative to the relative mouse input that the puck provided. And extra keys are available on all tablets (with the EKR on the cintiqs).

So over time we'll probably see use of the puck diminish and potentially disappear. We still need to support the devices (as we currently do), but specialised features like this one can be omitted. Current users are well served by the wacom X org driver which is still under development, so there's not the same need to be feature equivalent as with synaptics/evdev.

If you disagree with this assessment, feel free to re-open the bug. But note that reopening the bug doesn't mean the code will actually be written, because ETIME.

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