linux-backports-input proposal

[Chase Douglas]

On Wed, 2010-07-14 at 04:57 -0500, Taylor LeMasurier-Wren wrote:
> Dear Kernel Team,
> In Lucid and Maverick, the Wacom Bamboo Pen & Touch series, a newer
> series of wacom tablets, is broken and doesn't work. The current
> working solution is to download the upstream linuxwacom source and
> rebuild the wacom kernel module. As far as I can tell, the userspace
> driver is fine, and doesn't need to be updated. Right now, I've been
> recommending people who have this problem to download my wacom-dkms
> package from Wacom Kernel Module PPA (ppa:ripps818/wacom). This
> solution is easier than having them compile their own module, but it
> would be better to have a more official solution. Smb on
> #ubuntu-kernel recommended a l-b-m package, and suggested I contact
> this mailing list for more information. A wacom module backport
> package seems to be a more ideal solution to the problem. I'd like to
> know if it would be possible to implement one in Maverick, and a
> backport of it to Lucid?

First, is the issue fixed in upstream linux yet? If not, it needs to be
fixed there first. The wacom stuff is kinda weird cause they are taking
the opposite approach from everyone else and moving their drivers out of
the kernel instead of the other way around.

If a fix has been merged by upstream, we can take patches in Maverick to
have the issue fixed in Ubuntu as well.

As for adding a new l-b-m input package, it may be worthwhile. However,
we can't add packages retroactively to a released distro (at least not
yet). Thus, we can't create a new l-b-m-input package for Lucid. I would
be all for creating a new package for Maverick though.

-- Chase