Re: Proposed Orca Migration

[Bill Haneman <Bill Haneman Sun COM>]

On Wed, 2006-07-26 at 16:14, Shaun McCance wrote:
> On Wed, 2006-07-26 at 05:26 -0400, Willie Walker wrote:
> > Hi All:
> > 
> > In the spirit of keeping the Orca migration decoupled from the
> > accessibility properties dialog redesign, Bill Haneman has created
> > patches for control-center and gnome-session:
> > 
> > http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=348630 (control-center)
> > http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=348643 (gnome-session)
> > 
> > The first patch (control-center) gives preference to using 'orca' for
> > the exec_ats property if screen reading or magnification is desired, but
> > will fallback to 'gnopernicus' if 'orca' is not present on the machine.
> > 
> > The second patch (gnome-session) will fallback to 'orca' if the exec_ats
> > prefs has specified 'gnopernicus' but 'gnopernicus' is not present on
> > the machine.
> > 
> > These seem to address Shaun's migration concerns as well as Matthias'
> > FC6 concerns.
> > 
> > I'll be happy to work with the control-center and gnome-session
> > maintainers to roll these patches in for GNOME 2.16.
> > 
> > Comments?
> 
> I have only one concern with this proposal, and note that none
> of my previous proposals addressed this issue very well either.
> If I'm running different versions of Gnome off the same home
> directory, and I turn on the screen reader in the 2.16 desktop,
> my 2.14 desktop won't be able to launch the screen reader.

Will and I have talked about this case.  Our conclusion is that users
will not want to switch between gnopernicus and orca.  Besides, the case
you are referring to is actually a sort of "forward compatibility"
scenario which one can never really support, i.e. a 2.16 dialog enables
a feature not available in 2.14.  It also begs the question of why an
existing Gnome 2.14 would need a screenreader in 2.16 without having
enabled it previously, in 2.14.

Three solutions are available to the user of 2.14+2.16 shared
directories who actually runs the 2.16 dialog and enables automatic orca
startup:
1) install orca on the 2.14 desktop, where it should run fine;
2) use gnopernicus on both (with fallback to 'orca' on the 2.16 system,
if gnopernicus is not available);
3) ln -s /usr/bin/orca /usr/bin/gnopernicus on the 2.14 system.

> Situations like this are why it's nice to categorize the tools.
> It makes it easier to write forwards-compatible code.  Not that
> we could change past release now anyway.

Well, we could patch 2.14.X  but I don't think that these hypothetical
cases will actually have a serious impact on users (and in any case we
have straightforward workarounds).  Forwards-compatibility is tricky at
the best of times.

Bill

> --
> Shaun
> 
>