Re: Orca's external dependencies

[Frederic Peters <fpeters gnome org>]

Hi Joanmarie,

> Looking at the 2.91 External Dependencies list [1], I see neither Speech
> Dispatcher nor OpenTTS. OpenTTS got approved for the prior cycle. [2]
> But they've since re-merged (unforked?) with Speech Dispatcher. So....
> Do I need to propose Speech Dispatcher as an external dependency needed
> by Orca, or can I assume that because OpenTTS got blessed, Speech
> Dispatcher inherits that blessing and simply needs to be added to future
> lists of dependencies?
> 
> Similarly, Orca has always depended upon BRLTTY [3] for refreshable
> braille. Thus I was surprised to discover that BRLTTY was not listed as
> a dependency. Distros seem to know to include it, but should BRLTTY be
> something officially made an external dependency of GNOME?
> 
> Finally, if the answer to my question about BRLTTY is "Yes, it should be
> proposed/considered" by the Release Team, then I'd like to toss out one
> more for consideration: Liblouis. [4] Liblouis provides Orca users with
> the braille translation tables needed for contracted/"grade 2" braille.

We are moving away of the idea of approving/rejecting individual
modules and considering the features we want in GNOME. In that
direction we'd say that whatever is needed for Orca to do its work
is ok. Of course this calls for some common sense, to keep some
coherence in our stack, but in the specific case of Orca we are not
adding liblouis to our development platform, it just happens to be a
library that is used to provide Orca users an important feature.

But we want to have some guidelines, they are still to be discussed,
but the current proposal for modules developed outside of GNOME, and
with no consideration for our schedule, to require modules to depend
on released versions only.

Does this answer your question clearly enough?


        Fred