synaptics is well and truly deprecated, it has had a single commit in all of 2019 so far. Honestly, I'd rather you file an issue at https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/libinput/libinput/issues with the specific needs you have for your touchpad so we can figure out how to accommodate for that in libinput.

I agree with you.
It's a build requirement for plasma-desktop, that I am bringing to EPEL8.
I'll talk with the fedora plasma-desktop maintainer, see if he wants to drop it, or maybe I'll leave it off the EPEL 8 version.
I'm going to leave this ticket open for now, while I discuss that with him.

the only thing that plasma could depend on here is the synaptics-properties.h header and it'd be easier to just copy that one over to plasma from synaptics upstream. Or use the strings directly which is how it was originally intended to be used.

Unless plasma calls synclient and relies on that (not sure) in which case... yuck! :)

I have updated the appropriate spec files so that for EPEL8/RHEL packages, they do not need synaptics.
Thus, I am closing this as won't fix.
Thanks for you help.