Re: [orca-list] You all're gonna think I'm stupid, but, I need help with Gnome-Speech

[Christopher Chaltain <chaltain gmail com>]

So what are you saying? How are you defining better? Are you just
looking at the list of supported synthesizers? What about the cost to
maintain the code or port it over to use a different IPC mechanism?

I wasn't involved in the decision, but I'm sure it wasn't made lightly.
I don't know all of the issues facing the developers, but given how
precious development resources are and given how many issues there are
to solve, it isn't clear to me that they made the wrong decision in
choosing to spend developer hours elsewhere.

It's easy to say a package shouldn't be deprecated until there's another
package to replace it with strictly a superset of features, but it's
seldom that easy. Similar packages frequently have their own strengths
and weaknesses, and it's often a choice of maximizing the benefits while
minimizing the negatives.

I don't have a problem with your opinion or your right to be upset, and
maybe the wrong decision was made in this case. I just don't think the
issue is as easy as you make it out to seem or that the people who made
the decision were necessarily doing anything other than what they
thought was the right thing at the time. You make it sound like it was
so black and white, but as with any complex project, I suspect it was
more shades of Grey and a lot of tough decisions have to be made.

BTW, in my previous job, where primarily commercial and proprietary
software was being used, it was rare that a new tool was rolled out to
replace another tool where there wasn't some serious short comings in
some areas. It was frequently the case that we were trading off things
like cost of maintenance over a few features or areas of ease of use, so
it isn't true at all that this is an open source issue. This issue
exists wherever you have more features to implement than you have
resources to deliver.

There's also nothing stopping a company from paying Canonical or some
other company to support Ubuntu or add specific features to it. That's
the beauty of open source. Try paying a company putting out a
proprietary OS to support or add a specific feature. I think you'll find
this is a lot more possible and cheaper with Linux, so I don't thing
this one example of yours is a reason why Linux will never be mainstream.

On 01/05/12 21:10, Alex Midence wrote:
> Call me crazy but, I'm of the opinion that stuff should not be
> deprecated unless that which is replacing it is equal to or better than
> that which is replaces.  Anything else flies in the face of progress. 
> Those same people who decided to deprecate Gnome speech should have seen
> to it that speech dispatcher was going to do as good a job for all users
> as its predecessor before phasing it out.  This way those of us mortals
> without the wherewithall to "scratch" our proverbial itches wouldn't be
> left out in the cold while those who can improve product functionality
> make statements like:  "I could fix it but, I don't want to because *I*
> don't need it."  If I went and installed Linux at my business and made
> it our standard operating system for all my employees and had something
> phased out without something that replaced it with equal functionality,
> I'd be upset.  This is why Linux will never truly be mainstream.  Not
> that the paid solutions are without their flaws but over there, you can
> always fall back on:  "I'm paying for such and such and it's not working
> for me."
>
> Alex M
> On 5/1/2012 6:46 PM, Luke Yelavich wrote:
> > On Wed, May 02, 2012 at 03:35:52AM EST, Alex Midence wrote:
> > > I've always wondered why they haul off and fix what isn't broken.  Why
> > > was Gnome speech deprecated?  I don't believe speech dispatcher
> > > supports nearly as much stuff as gnome speech did:  Hardware speech
> > > synthesizers, commercial speech synthesizers like dectalk, nuance and
> > > acapella and on and on and on.
> > GNOME Speech was deprecated for a couple of reasons:
> > * THe inter process communication mechanism that GNOME speech uses
> > known as CORBA, or orbit/bonobo was being deprecated.
> > * Speech-dispatcher had python bindings and Orca could already work
> > with speech-dispatcher.
> >
> > So even though speech-dispatcher may not yet support the same range of
> > synths as GNOME speech, it was less work to use speech-dispatcher than
> > it would have been to port GNOME speech to dbus or something else.
> > GNOME speech also doesn't do anything with the resulting audio output
> > from the speech synthesizes it supports, whereas speech-dispatcher
> > handles audio output for synths that support it.
> >
> > Someone need only step up and write a DECtalk, Cepstral, or other
> > synth driver for speech-dispatcher, and it will be accepted. For those
> > of us who have access to sed synths like myself, its a matter of
> > finding the time and desire to actually do the work. FOr myself, since
> > I am happy with espeak, I have no need to scratch an itch that is not
> > there.
> >
> > Luke
> > _______________________________________________
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> > Visit http://live.gnome.org/Orca for more information on Orca.
> > The manual is at
> > http://library.gnome.org/users/gnome-access-guide/nightly/ats-2.html
> > The FAQ is at http://live.gnome.org/Orca/FrequentlyAskedQuestions
> > Log bugs and feature requests at http://bugzilla.gnome.org
> > Find out how to help at http://live.gnome.org/Orca/HowCanIHelp
>
> _______________________________________________
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> http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/orca-list
> Visit http://live.gnome.org/Orca for more information on Orca.
> The manual is at
> http://library.gnome.org/users/gnome-access-guide/nightly/ats-2.html
> The FAQ is at http://live.gnome.org/Orca/FrequentlyAskedQuestions
> Log bugs and feature requests at http://bugzilla.gnome.org
> Find out how to help at http://live.gnome.org/Orca/HowCanIHelp


-- 
Christopher (CJ)
chaltain gmail com