Letting go of DIGImend
I’m finally letting go of DIGImend (this time for good).
I have barely touched DIGImend since the beginning of the pandemic. My last considerable effort was attempting to implement support for user-space HID device drivers using libusb and Lua. That curdled upon encountering another convoluted way Wacom driver stack works, which wouldn’t work for other drivers (hardcoded USB VID:PID again). Plus there was no way to make Wayland input stack work well with that anyway, at that moment.
Shortly afterwards, at LPC 2022 in Dublin, I talked to Benjamin Tissoires about his work and his talk on HID-BPF. The aim of that project is similar: to make it easier to write HID device fixups, including for graphics tablets. Albeit using BPF (duh!). That is of course more complex to write than Lua, but still easier than a full-on kernel driver in C. Plus Benjamin is working full-time on the input stack, and he has much better support for taking it to a good place (which he continues doing).
In 2022, José Expósito has started working on the HID and input subsystem in the Linux kernel, and he has brought some welcome changes and support for more tablets to both upstream and DIGImend. He also synced the DIGImend kernel drivers to upstream. I gave him admin permissions on the drivers repo, and he worked on it and helped some user for a while afterwards. Thank you, José!
However, the message from him, Benjamin, and I suppose Peter Hutterer too, is to use HID-BPF as much as possible from now on, instead of creating new or modifying existing kernel drivers written in C. IIRC, at LPC 2024 they said that it still cannot do the weird switch-to-proprietary-mode USB requests, but I suspect they have a solution in mind.
However, I think I exhausted all the energy and interest I had for DIGImend now. Having started it in 2008, I think I have done a good deal to help the community in return for all the awesome Open-Source software I’m getting to use.
With this, I’m closing my Patreon, Liberapay, and Buy Me a Coffee accounts I created to support my work on the project. Unfortunately it was never enough to cover my time, but it was good while it lasted. I’m grateful to everyone who chipped in and sent me whatever they could through those services, and also for advice on growing the engagement and getting more support, from some of them, which I largely couldn’t follow through on.
I hope the Linux input stack continues evolving and eventually gets a re-engineering it needs and deserves, so things are fun again, even for people not paid to work on it.
I’ll keep the project website and the GitHub organization in place, of course, but I will not be the one helping people out, or working on them. Thank you everyone!
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