Skip to content

Intent to fork the Wacom panel into a separate application

In #3088 (comment 2151620) (and follow-up comments) where @jimmac says:

quite a big consensus on wacom devices being a really long tail. It's both very rare for a regular person to have a wacom and actual digital artists loving to customize things to a ridiculous extent. Would really work much better to be a standalone app, a graphical alternative to xsetwacom/gsetwacom.

So I'm filing this issue as a discussion point - right now my plan is to fork GNOME Settings into a new project (current code name "Mesero" 1), drop all but the Wacom panel code, wrangle the rest into a standalone application and voila - we have a standalone Wacom configuration tool. This would give us an immediate transition - we have two tools that do exactly the same thing and eventually we can remove the Wacom bits from GNOME Settings. Our only breakage would then be that users need to install and find the new tool but functionally everything is equivalent from day 1.

What I'd like to hear esp from the current maintainers though is any "yeah, nah" or "please don't" in case you disagree with that approach or whether you're broadly supportive of this.

And what should a timeline for this be? Moving into a standalone application should be relatively trivial, whether this can be done for GNOME 47 or that is too hasty is the main question. If 47 is too soon/quick, then I probably won't fork until 47 is out so we don't need to maintain two separate code-bases that we need to pass patches to/from.

Other questions are whether to then treat this as fully external app or still part of GNOME (relevant initially to naming) and, longer term, whether to tie the release schedules to GNOME or just go independent (new functionality will always be tied at least to mutter anyway). And probably lots of other questions, so please feel free to comment anything that pops in your head.

cc @felipeborges @velsinki @carlosg as the current maintainers

cc @jigpu, @Joshua-Dickens @Pinglinux as the ones probably most interested in this

  1. I can be grudgingly convinced to use a more boring name like GNOME TabletConfig or whatever. ↩