Re: [g-a-devel] Speech-dispatcher/orca integration specification, first draft.

[Henning Oschwald <h oschwald gmx de>]

Hi,

On Mi, Mär 25 2009, Eitan Isaacson wrote:

> PulseAudio will ultimately allow us to take full advantage of our
> audio devices, with multiple streams, network transparency, and other
> great tricks.

I aggree that Pulseaudio has the potencial to bring us some cool
features. However, a big drawback is the increased complexity which
comes with an additional layer in the audio subsystem. Above all,
supposing a running X session is a bad idea and a system configuration
with this assumption in mind will make working on a text console more
complicated, not to say impossible if one doesn't want to turn the whole
system upside down.

> The entire Linux desktop has slowly been moving services from the
> system into the session, for example volume mounting, network
> settings, even display configuration.  One of the motivations is
> security: The current user should have control over the hardware.

Giving more hardware control to a regular user account looks to me
actually more like a security issue than a security fix.

> I think this debate goes beyond accessibility requirements and into the
> "old" and "new" way of doing stuff. I miss having absolute control over
> the network with ifconfig, but NetworkManager is very appealing to users
> who never considered Linux before, not to mention it saves a lot of
> hassle in a wifi world.

Well, there are the newbies to consider. But on the other hand a newbie
won't stay a newbie forever and a more experienced user shouldn't be
limited in his work. In the end, flexibility is one of the main reasons
why many of us prefer Linux or other open source operating systems to
other more restrictive OSes.

So please keep in mind the're still a lot of console users which don't
want or can not have a X session available just to have speech output.

cheers

  Henning