1) The new option -s is very useful on X when you use gpm as a
   repeater.  This should be mentioned on the gpm.conf file itself, next
   to the suggestion to use responsiveness=15.

3) There is no documentation on how to use it and what is its purpose.
   I found on the net a mail by Alessandro Rubini that put me on the
   right track, but that's all.

2) The value to put after -s is not obvious.  Trial and error in my case
   shows little or no effect for values 1-9, and the expected effect for
   s greater than 9.  Apparently little difference between 11 and 30,
   though, but this may be my incapability at perceiveing the
   deifference.  However, at s=10 there is a bad side effect: the click
   does not work well any more, and you cannot rapidly click (press and
   release), but you must let some time pass between press and release,
   lest the click be ignored.  Slow users may never notice this.

   This is a bug, probably in gpm, and until it is corrected it could be
   mentioned in gpm.conf not to use sample_rate=10.

Osamu Aoki wrote:

I disagree.  It's common that Unix tools can handle filename globbing.
e.g. Are you suggesting that one should use xargs with ls to list all
the files matching a certain pattern?

I would have looked to see where it was an "upstream design decision"
but I couldn't find the upstream bug tracker.  The last comment in this
bug report

However I'm not going to play bug tennis by re-opening the bug report,
I'll leave it to someone else.  But far from "serving no purpose", this
bug *still* annoys me, and has done for many years.

Antony