[g-a-devel] [Fwd: Mousetweaks: integrate into GNOME Shell or keep in its current form?]

[magpie <thismagpie live com>]

Happy 2014 everyone,

I thought I'd sent this last week but it came up in the a11y meeting 
today that the email was not in archives so I am resending and hopefully 
this finds everyone well. Further to that I am actually going to cross 
post to the GNOME Shell list (I was not sure whether to do that last 
week so did not) as Alejandro pointed out it is a decision for both 
mousetweaks developers and the GNOME Shell team to make so hopefully 
they will not mind the cross post! I added point 6 but have left the 
rest as it was.

I am bringing the following thread up:

https://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-accessibility-devel/2013-November/msg00007.html

It seemed to fizzle out with nothing decided and am hoping to finding 
out what people and hopefully Gerd and Francesco (the mousetweaks 
developers) are thinking now that some dialogue has happened. It would 
be good to find out what can be done for the feature. A few of 
points/questions/concerns on this:

1. I posted this out to both GNOME Shell and a11y lists first off 
(reluctant to keep doing that but feel free to forward this on anyone 
who thinks to do so) yet seems to have been very little comment from 
general group of gnome-shell developers. Will gnome-shell actually want 
this? I am less sure since I have tried quite a few times to get 
Mousetweaks in the menu for this 5 year old bug: 
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=589906 and the response so 
far has not seemed very encouraging.

2. Component Maintenance in GNOME Shell. MouseTweaks into GNOME Shell 
might need to make sure that they (or someone at least) is going to be 
practically able to maintain and develop that work after it is in. Two 
reviews are needed for each commit, apparently. Getting one review seems 
pretty impossible, if two reviews are going to needed for bugs which 
arise after mousetweaks lands (assuming it would  there :-) ) Then g-s 
mousetweaks is probably going to have a difficult time keeping up.

3. Francesco seemed to have some reservations as I understood things I 
think he was concerned that implementing mouse-tweaks in gnome-shell 
would lead make Mousetweaks less accessible (i,e. by turning into a 
solution only gnome-users can access. If I got that right, and those 
concerns still exist then it would be good to discuss them a bit more so 
we can pinpoint what exactly might need to be done.

4. I pulled the extents logic rout of the magnifier and made it so the 
query to the component and text interfaces are done solely by the 
tracker, whatever client connects to it should be free to just make use 
of whatever extents it needs without the clients' developer having to 
rewrite existing code. This means mousetweaks should be able to easily 
make use of the focus tracking to perform the hover click actions by 
setting a threshold time and then performing some check to see whether 
an object is in focus long enough to activate a simulated click, I 
suppose. No doubt there is more to this, but I wonder will that help? If 
so I can polish that work off and file a bug for it.

5. GNOME Shell keyboard + mousetweaks. Thoughts?

6. If it does get written to GNOME Shell, would this be better as an 
extension rather than a component?

Best wishes,
Magdalen