[Hardy][regression] input devices (in particular Logitech mice) that require evdev to work properly are now broken

Binary package hint: xserver-xorg-input-all

There are several input devices, in particular Logitech MX and LX series mice, which require evdev to work properly.
Without evdev some buttons do not generate input events. Also evdev was required to change the button mapping to get horizontal scrolling working. ( https://help.ubuntu.com/community/MX1000Mouse , or see bug #27421 )

Running Hardy, using X.Org 7.3 with XInputHotplug, evdev is disabled by default. If a device is listed in xorg.conf with driver evdev, it will not work, as indicated by the log file:

(...)
(EE) Configured Mouse: cannot open input pEvdev
(II) UnloadModule: "evdev"
(EE) PreInit returned NULL for "Configured Mouse"
(...)

As suggested in bug #173833 , evdev can be enabled via hal, by
$ sudo cp /usr/share/doc/hal/examples/10-x11-input.fdi /etc/hal/fdi/policy/

This indeed enables evdev devices (there were reports, that this is not always the case), but now evdev overtakes the control for all input devices. I attach my log for this case. As a result Ctrl+Alt+Backspace did not work, the given keyboard layout specified in xorg.conf was ignored. Other problems were also reported there. (No support for multiple readers for the same device etc.)
As stated in bug #42678 the InputHotplug facility should be used instead of evdev. But as mentioned, lots of input devices do no work properly this way.

For me, only evdev was able to recognize all the 12 input buttons for my LX7 USB mouse. In fact, is has only nine, but then I could set the appropriate button mapping to got all the nine real buttons including the horizontal scrolling working:
$ xinput set-button-map "`xinput list|grep Logitech|tr -d \\"|cut -f1`" 1 2 3 4 5 11 12 8 9 10 6 7

I suggest either to fix evdev and enable it's usage by default again, or make the xinputhotplug recognize all input devices properly.