Question about psmouse alps driver patches

I submitted normalized patches to Canonical Ubuntu in October for the alps psmouse touchpad. The thread is long and confusing at

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/606238

Since then, I have maintained a psmouse dlkm that provides alps support for a number of new systems, primarily from Dell.

Recently, I have been asked by several people to submit the patches to linux-input to merge into the upstream kernel. I am looking for advice on how to proceed. The big problems are:

1) The alps touchpads seem to be mutating relatively quickly with several unrecognized signatures appearing over the last few months after I built my patches.

2) A number of people have submitted a patch for a particular alps touchpad signature, which will need to be reconciled and rolled-up into a single driver. See the Jan 20 3-part submission by [email protected]. His patches look good, and clean up the code a good bit, but target a touchpad signature also reverse-engineered by [email protected]. I integrated the bgarami fixes into my patches but the patches from [email protected] are radically different.

3) I built the patches against the 3.2 kernel. My understanding is they do not even compile against the kernel head - something like 3.5.x.

I feel bad submitting the patches I have. They are big and rough because several of us reverse-engineered the ALPS interfaces but did not try to figure them out. It will take a lot of merge+test work to reconcile the patch submissions for the various alps target platforms.

What do you suggest I do (e.g. submit a patch for only the new protocol I can test?)

Hi,

dturvene> I feel bad submitting the patches I have. They are big and dturvene> rough because several of us reverse-engineered the ALPS dturvene> interfaces but did not try to figure them out. It will take dturvene> a lot of merge+test work to reconcile the patch submissions dturvene> for the various alps target platforms.

dturvene> What do you suggest I do (e.g. submit a patch for only the new dturvene> protocol I can test?)

Yes, other devices can be tested and added by other people. I would be interested in getting the alps in my Dell e6230 working for one.

Bye, Peter Korsgaard