Comment 11 for bug 30378

@10: It shouldn't. Expecting every game, past present and future (including closed-source ones where the developers bundled a copy of everything except libc and libGL to avoid having to maintain them) to special-case joysticks on Linux is insanity.

This disagreement over approach reminds me of a Buddhist quote.

“Where would I find enough leather
To cover the entire surface of the earth?
But with leather soles beneath my feet,
It’s as if the whole world has been covered.”

Even if that weren't the case, ignoring the joystick is architecturally wrong. The X server is supposed to reset the screensaver counter on INPUT. Joysticks are input. (And they're not typically used for the special "Let's control the music player without waking the monitors" case which justifies LIRC also being an exception.)

Anyway, since the xf86-input-joystick driver can watch the joystick without blocking other applications, I've just e-mailed the upstream developer/maintainer to ask whether it's possible to use it to map joystick input to the X11 input queue in a way which would have no effect beyond being visible to the screensaver subsystem.