The xf86-input-wacom driver hits 1.0

After roughly 20 years and counting up to 0.40 in release numbers, I've decided to call the next version of the xf86-input-wacom driver the 1.0 release. [1] This cycle has seen a bulk of development (>180 patches) which is roughly as much as the last 12 releases together. None of these patches actually added user-visible features, so let's talk about technical dept and what turned out to be an interesting way of reducing it.
The wacom driver's git history goes back to 2002 and the current batch of maintainers (Ping, Jason and
have all been working on it for one to two decades. It used to be a Wacom-only driver but with the improvements made to the kernel over the years the driver should work with most tablets that have a kernel driver, albeit some of the more quirky niche features will be more limited (but your non-Wacom devices probably don't have those features anyway).
The one constant was always: the driver was extremely difficult to test, something common to all X input drivers. Development is a cycle of restarting the X server a billion times, testing is mostly plugging hardware in and moving things around in the hope that you can spot the bugs. On a driver that doesn't move much, this isn't necessarily a problem. Until a bug comes along, that requires some core rework of the event handling - in the kernel, libinput and, yes, the wacom driver.
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