Either through lack of documentation, or because it's really not supported, there's no way to switch button mapping without reassigning the tap behaviour as well. It should be possible to swap the left/right physical buttons on the touchpad, but let the "tap" be button 1. Currently, gnome-settings-daemon will ignore all the touchpads. Once it's possible to swap only the physical buttons, we can remove that behaviour in gnome-settings-daemon.
This is awkward but: the button mapping is handled in the server, tapping in the driver. So if you switch tapping to 3-2-1 and the device button mapping to 3-2-1, tap 1 comes through as button 1 while phys. button 1 comes through as button 3. I'll add this to the man page.
How would we do this programmatically?
The button mapping through XSetDeviceButtonMapping as usual, the TapButton by changing the property on the synaptics driver. http://cvs.fedoraproject.org/viewvc/rpms/gnome-settings-daemon/F-11/gnome-settings-daemon-2.26.0-support-touchpads.patch?revision=1.1&view=markup set_tap_to_click (gboolean state) does it for the normal 1/3/2 mapping, you'd just need to set it to 3/1/2.
Discussed at today's critical bug review meeting. Jesse opined that it's an annoyance, not truly an issue that should block release. I didn't have a strong opinion. So we're dropping it to F12Target on that basis. -- Fedora Bugzappers volunteer triage team https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/BugZappers
Filed as GNOME bug 599623 (https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=599623) Fixed in build: http://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/taskinfo?taskID=1768089 Requested for F12 final.
tag request was accepted, closing. -- Fedora Bugzappers volunteer triage team https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/BugZappers