Provide libinput 1.10.7 to fix specific touchpad and keyboard issues

This is the first time I've submitted an SRU request - let me know if there is more detail I need to add

I have ThinkPad T440s and I have a lot of issues with touchpad. Before installing Kubuntu 18.04, I used Arch and those issues did not appear after updating libinput to 1.10.5. So please provide us this update soon.

libinput (1.10.5-0+ppa0~18.04.0) bionic; urgency=medium

  * New upstream release

 -- Michael Marley <email address hidden> Thu, 19 Apr 2018 06:00:00 -0400

ppa:mamarley/updates

Thanks, just tested the libinput 1.10.5 packages in that PPA - I can confirm it fixes the problem for my Dell XPS13 L322X on Bionic.

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

I can see libinput 1.10.5 is now in Cosmic: https://packages.ubuntu.com/cosmic/libinput10

What else do I need to do to get this provided as an SRU to Bionic?

We now have version 1.10.6 in cosmic :)

Q: What else do I need to do to get this provided as an SRU to Bionic?
A: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/StableReleaseUpdates#Procedure

Although the prerequisite for a bionic SRU has been met (cosmic updated first), I suggest it might be better engineering practice to let version 1.10.6 cool and mature a little first. We want to see it working in the wild for a while, and without any side-effects or regressions.

I was involved in a touchpad issue for Logitech wireless keyboard/touchpad combo devices where they used a debounce exception rule with an odd name and the code that made it into the 1.10.6 sources for cosmic needs work so be careful what you wish for.

https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=106534

Latest upstream code relabels the function, for clarity, and removes duplication in the "quirk" exception handler.

Is that fixed in 1.10.7? :)

https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/wayland-devel/2018-May/038187.html

For the record, we now have 1.10.7 in cosmic.

Upgrading to 1.11 would fix those + touchpad movement in general

See also bug 1778072.

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Cosmic now has 1.11.1 - would it make more sense to change this to instead request 1.11.1 be SRU'ed into Bionic? Or still request for 1.10.6?

Technically a stable release like bionic should stay on the original series it was released with (1.10) and get bug fixes only. So ideally only libinput 1.10.7, but also libinput isn't clear-cut about only releasing bug fixes in such releases and sometimes includes enhancements which would also make it more difficult to get authorised for bionic.

Only as a last resort would we consider 1.11 for bionic.

If 1.10.7 fixes your issues then I think it's what we should aim for:

  https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/libinput/1.10.7-1/+build/14916956

I can confirm that updates from ppa:mamarley/updates libinput 1.11.3-0+ppa0~18.04.0 fix problem on Dell XPS L322X.

I want to add that the touchpad dropout issues affect the Lenovo Thinkpad T460s series as well. I got things working by downloading and installing the latest libinput packages for cosmic (unstable) from https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/libinput. I installed libinput10, libinput-bin, and libinput-tools 1.12.0-1.

History:

When I first got this T460s I found the touchpad would drop out frequently in ubuntu. I got around this by using the synaptics driver (package xserver-xorg-input-synaptics) instead of libinput. But the synaptics driver has palm detection behavior that I couldn't get working, so I was constantly doing things like selecting and replacing text unintentionally while typing.

Today I found a series of Fedora bug reports on this issue with these Thinkpads, culminating in https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1572394 which suggested that a fix was included in libinput 1.10.5.3 (not sure when exactly it was introduced). These bug reports indicate that the Trackpoint device on the affected Thinkpads is prone to sending spurious events that trigger the palm detection behavior in libinput. Disabling the Trackpoint device thus fixes the touchpad drop-outs.

With the later version of libinput my T460s touchpad and trackpoint are working great, and I have good palm detection behavior. Woohoo! Consider this a vote in favor of the SRU.