libinput 1.12 was a massive development effort (over 300 patchsets) with a bunch of new features being merged. It'll be released next week or so, so it's worth taking a step back and looking at what actually changed.
The device quirks files replace the previously used hwdb-based udev properties. I've written about this in more detail here but the gist is: we have our own .ini style file format that can match on devices and apply the various quirks devices need. This simplifies debugging a lot, we can now reliably tell users why a quirks file applies or doesn't apply, historically a problem with the hwdb.
The sphinx-based documentation was merged, fixed and added to. We switched to sphinx for the docs and the result is much more user-friendly. Which was the point, it was a switch from a developer-oriented documentation to a user-oriented one. Not that documentation is ever finished.
The usual set of touchpad improvements went in, e.g. the slight motion on finger up is now ignored. We have size-based thumb detection now (useful for Apple touchpads!). And of course various quirks for better pressure ranges, etc. Tripletap on some synaptics touchpads had a tendency to cause multiple taps because of some weird event sequence. Movement in the software button now generates events, the buttons are not just a dead zone anymore. Pointer jump detection is more adaptive now and catches and discards smaller jumps that previously slipped through the cracks. A particularly quirky behaviour was seen on Dell XPS i2c touchpads that exhibit a huge pointer jump, courtesy of the trackpoint controller going to sleep and taking its time to wake up. The delay is still there but the pointer at least lands in the correct location.
We now have improved direction-locking for two-finger scrolling on touchpads. Scrolling up/down should not generate horizontal scroll events anymore as long as the movement is close enough to vertical. This feature is transparent, a diagonal or horizontal movement will immediately disable the direction lock and produce horizontal scroll events as expected.
The trackpoint acceleration has been re-done, see this post for more details and links to the background articles. I've only received one bug report for the new acceleration so it seems to work quite well now. Trackpoints that send events in bursts (e.g. bluetooth ones) are smoothened now to avoid jerky movement.
Velocity averaging was dropped to increase pointer accuracy. Previously we averaged the velocity across multiple events which makes the motion smoother on jittery devices but less accurate on good devices.
We build on FreeBSD now. Presumably this also means it works on FreeBSD :)
libinput now supports palm detection on touchscreens, at least where the ABS_MT_TOOL_TYPE evdev bit is provided.
I think that's about it. Busy days...
