Bug 79005

Summary:	[RFE] mouse buttons wasted due to generic configurations
Product:	[Retired] Red Hat Linux	Reporter:	Michael Lee Yohe <michael>
Component:	redhat-config-mouse	Assignee:	Brent Fox <bfox>
Status:	CLOSED DEFERRED	QA Contact:
Severity:	medium	Docs Contact:
Priority:	medium
Version:	8.0	CC:	mitr
Target Milestone:	---	Keywords:	FutureFeature
Target Release:	---
Hardware:	i686
OS:	Linux
Whiteboard:
Fixed In Version:		Doc Type:	Enhancement
Doc Text:		Story Points:	---
Clone Of:		Environment:
Last Closed:	2002-12-18 21:19:24 UTC	Type:	---
Regression:	---	Mount Type:	---
Documentation:	---	CRM:
Verified Versions:		Category:	---
oVirt Team:	---	RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:
Cloudforms Team:	---	Target Upstream Version:
Embargoed:

Description Michael Lee Yohe 2002-12-04 15:41:43 UTC

From Bugzilla Helper:
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 Galeon/1.2.6 (X11; Linux i686; U;) Gecko/20020830

Description of problem:
Most modern mice come configured with more than three accessible buttons. 
However, selection of a mouse during the initial installation or using the
redhat-config-mouse applet sort of assumes that you only have 3 mouse buttons. 
The only thing it seems to determine is whether Z axis mapping should be
inserted into the XFree86 configuration file.

Mouse drivers for Windows allow manufacturers to assign different functions to
other mouse buttons (common double-click).  Such functionality should also exist
in Red Hat Linux.  XFree86 natively supports mice with more than three buttons.

Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):


How reproducible:
Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. see description
2.
3.
	

Actual Results:  see description

Expected Results:  see description

Additional info:

Comment 1 Brent Fox 2002-12-18 21:19:24 UTC

This is a pretty hard request to implement.  In Windows, mice manufacturers
write their own software, so they can tailor the software to use all the
particular features of each mouse.  Microsoft does not attempt to write all the
mice drivers themselves as the work involved would be huge.

Most mice manufacturers choose to not create such drivers for Linux.  In my
opinion, these features needs to come from the mice manufacturers, not Red Hat.  

X Windows does support mice with more than three buttons, but that doesn't help
us during mouse configuration.  As far as I know, there is no way to probe the
mouse to detect how many buttons there are.  We also don't have a lab full of
every kind of mouse in existence.

Don't get me wrong, I understand your point and I agree with it, but I just
don't see a practical way that we could undertake such a project.  The same
problem exists with a lot of the keyboards these days which have all kinds of
extra buttons to launch various applications.  I would love to have those work
as well as they do in Windows, but we have almost no cooperation from the
hardware manufacturers in the consumer/peripheral market segment.

Deferring this report.