Comment 22 for bug 774978

Marcelo, the record extension will still be loaded indeed. However, without synaptics the extension is not activated.
You can check this by attaching gdb to Xorg (from a second pc) and setting a breakpoint on RecordAReply. If the breakpoint is hit, record is active.
With synaptics installed (on a pc with a touchpad, so synaptics is actually used) you will see the breakpoint is hit, without synaptics it is not hit.

Btw, my current fix/workaround is to build synaptics without record support, by dropping the libxtst-dev build-dependency. This way the touchpad is working properly and X does not crash.