[SDL] Mouse wheel in SDL??

[Jason Hoffoss]

----- Original Message -----
From: "David Olofson" <david.olofson at reologica.se>
To: <sdl at libsdl.org>
Sent: Tuesday, March 12, 2002 12:09 PM
Subject: Re: [SDL] Mouse wheel in SDL??


> On Tuesday 12 March 2002 14:14, Jason Hoffoss wrote:
> [...]
> > Ya, I know, that's how they hacked support in for it quickly, and it
> > became traditional to do that.  I think the new X now has Z axis
> > support for mice natively though.  But of course, in the Unix world,
> > once people become used to something for more than 2 seconds, they'd
> > rather cut off their left arm than do things differently than what they
> > are used to now, so no one is using it.
>
> That's just because we don't want to force people to upgrade half their
> system every two seconds.

X has already been upgrade now how many times since this hack was first
introduced?  Probably quite a few now.  They still haven't fixed it to work
cleanly instead of being a hack.  Adding it to one of these updates wouldn't
have forced anyone to upgrade any more quickly than they already do, so
that's not the issue.  It seems to me like they are failing to plan ahead in
their designs, and willing to go with hacks if it works good enough for now
than replacing them with solid solutions.  They are reactive to technology
changes, and don't add support for them until after they start becoming
widely available.  Then there's lag before anyone can use it in Linux, while
Windows is already supporting it all.

>From what I've seen, btw, you don't need to force people to upgrade half
their system constantly.  They seem to enjoy doing that already on their
own.

> > And so what if you have, say, an Intellimouse Explorer, which has 5
> > buttons already, plus a mouse wheel?  If all software assumes that
> > buttons 4 and 5 are the wheel, the real buttons 4 and 5 need to be 6
> > and 7 now?  It's just a bad system for handling it.
>
> Yes it is. The hack is just another one that should not have been, and
> that will take years to get rid of, now that every other toolkit
> (including my VisTk) and application relies on it... *heh*

Yep, that's why you try and avoid hacks in the first place, especially in
software that's already widely available.

   -Jason