Community meeting on IRC 2nd February 2023

Announcements
10
  • Name/IRC nick: nephros
  • Topic: Handling of X10iii hardware button (Assistant Button)
  • Some details about the topic:

This is related to this feature request.

Please advise on a way forward with supporting the unhandled button present on X10iii devices.

Question 1: Making the key accessible to the OS components:

AFAICS there are several options of handling the key event:

  1. Re-use the existant functionality of MCE and lipstick-jolla-home and map the button to a HOME key. This has been done in this PR I propose.
  2. Replicate the handling of the HOME key in MCE (like 1, above), but send a separate signal to lipstick. This approach I am exploring in this branch.
  3. Similar to 1. and 2., but handle it in the evdev codepath of MCE rather than the powerkey one.
  4. Not caring about MCE at all, make the key code known to Qt, so one can use Qt.Key_xxx, and implement handling similar to Qt.Key_HomePage, see lipstick-jolla-home-qt5/compositor.qml Line 1800, and lipstick-jolla-home-qt5/compositor/HardwareKeyHandler.qml
  5. other?

Question 2: Handling key press events

Once the button press can be signalled to the OS, it should do something. Preferably this should be user-configurable. (The Feature Request thread contains a selection of ideas users might use this for.)

I see the following variants:

a) in Lipstick/compositor, hardcode a certain set of UI actions, similar to what is today done with the Home key, and the keys handled in HardwareKeyHandler.
b) in MCE/mce-tool, implement something similar to power key handling, where a set of dbus calls (actions) can be defined, and selected to be executed on press
c) in Lipstick/compositor, support a single dconf key containing the name of an application .desktop file, which shall be launched when the button is pressed.
d) in Lipstick/compositor, support a set of dconf keys, which can contain the parameters of a dbus call (i.e. some or all of the parameters of invokeDBusMethod() from lipstick-jolla-home-qt5/compositor.qml Line 566)
e) hardcode a Jolla-conceived very sexy killer feature which makes everyone go “wow you can do that??”

D would be the most flexible, but has potential for abuse, security concerns, and might impact stability.

If there is interest, I have a working PoC of variant 2 plus C I can share.

  • Approx. time needed: 10-15 min, further clarification could also happen on the PR mentioned.
  • Substitute (optional):
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