Comment 6 for bug 17245

Why do we need a GUI? What do we seek to have accomplished with one?

Firstly, jscalibrator referenced in the original report mostly broke stuff back when we built it (because only searchandrescue *used* the values, and it would put the joystick in an odd state).

Secondly, while there is the jscal utility, most joysticks work fine in most environments without it. If we're ending up with oversensitive or undersensitive joysticks in X, this is an issue in xserver-xorg-input-joystick that it should check the range of an axis to determine appropriate scaling. If we're seeing significant off-center values, that's a hardware issue, and is better solved with hardware centering adjustment (although jscal can help for hardware that is both broken and deficient).

Thirdly, I don't think that we need a separate config utility to handle joysticks. For 99% of available hardware, simply mapping Axes 0,1,2,3 to X,Y,Z,W works, and mapping Buttons 0,1,2 ... to mouse buttons 0,1,2 ... should also work.

It may be nice to have some option to turn on or off joystick input device handling, but as a single checkbox, this doesn't need a separate application, and should just be part of the various control tools that handle other X properties.

Note that advanced users will need input remapping and input multiplexing, but this is better done by using an input multiplexor or remapper directly, rather than attempting to wedge something into the default suite of tools (not that I'd complain about an input multiplexor by default, but that I think the number of users who need one is vanishingly small).