Re: [RFC] UCLogic: Filtering unsupported HUION tablets

[José Expósito]

On Thu, Jul 21, 2022 at 11:39:06AM +0200, Bastien Nocera wrote:
> On Mon, 2022-07-18 at 19:29 +0200, José Expósito wrote:
> > Hi!
> > 
> > No code yet, just a kind request for comments and hopefully some
> > wisdom
> > and experience from Nikolai dealing with HUION devices.
> > 
> > HUION keeps reusing the same vendor and product IDs for their
> > devices.
> > This makes it really difficult to differentiate between devices and
> > handle them in the kernel and also in user space.
> > 
> > Reusing IDs could introduce a problem:
> > 
> > If HUION, or other vendor following the same practices, releases a
> > new
> > tablet with a duplicated product ID, the UCLogic driver would handle
> > it.
> > The device might work with the existing code or it might fail because
> > of
> > a new feature or a whole different firmware.
> > 
> > As far as I know, at the moment there is not a mechanism in place to
> > avoid this situation.
> > I think that it'd be better to ignore those devices in UCLogic and
> > let
> > the HID generic driver handle them because using HID generic would
> > provide a basic user experience while using UCLogic might fail to
> > probe
> > the tablet.
> > 
> > DIGImend's web already provides a nice list of supported devices:
> > http://digimend.github.io/tablets/
> > 
> > So, I wonder:
> > 
> >  - Do you think it makes sense to ignore untested devices?
> >  - If the answer is yes, do we have a better option than checking the
> >    device name against an allow-list? It'd be great to hear other
> >    people's ideas.
> 
> I don't think it makes sense to ignore untested devices, unless you
> know for a fact they won't work.
> 
> But if the name is part of detecting the device, it would certainly
> make sense to use that as part of the identifier for the device, rather
> than just the USB VIP:PID.

Agreed, I also think that adding the name to the vendor/product IDs
pair would be a better identifier. However, at this point, we don't 
have that information for all supported tablets, so I guess that we
will have to fix new tablets reusing the VIP:PID as they are
released.

It is unfortunate, but we'll have to deal with it.

Thanks a lot for your comments!
Jose

> You should be able to add the product strings in the .driver_data, and
> check them in probe().
> 
> Cheers