[GOK] gok and gnome 3.0

[Ben Konrath <ben konrath utoronto ca>]

Hi,

For the past couple of weeks I have been looking into the state of gok
with the intention of making a plan to update gok for GNOME 3.0 and,
hopefully, beyond.

Right now there are two primary issues that I would like to get some
input on and resolve so that I can start hacking:

1) How should we deal with the AT-SPI moving to DBus?

I see two options here: we can either move gok over to Python and use
pyatspi2 or we can keep gok in c and port it to cspi2. For the second
option, somebody, I guess that's me, will have to work on cspi2.

My feeling is that moving GOK over to Python is a better long term
strategy - this brings us inline with other GNOME accessibility apps and
it will be easier to experiment when it comes time to add new features
after GNOME 3.0. This, however, is only my opinion. I would like to get
comments from other people and hopefully come to a consensus on this
issue before I proceed. Gerd, I'm specifically interested in hearing
your opinion on this.

Will, Do you know what the state of pyatspi2 is? Is the status listed
here still correct?:

http://www.linuxfoundation.org/en/Accessibility/ATK/AT-SPI/AT-SPI_on_D-Bus

2) How are we going to deal with integrating with gnome-shell?

Currently GOK cannot interact with the Overview mode of gnome-shell.
When gnome-shell becomes the default, users will not be able to access
any actions in the Activities menu (launch programs, access Places, use
recent files, use Workspaces etc). Obviously this is a major problem.

I think the solution for this is to somehow have a gok presentation
layer within gnome-shell. I hacked up a dirty mock-up so that people can
get an idea of what I'm thinking about:

http://bagu.org/scratch/gok-in-gnome-shell.png

When the user selects the workspace, gok would remain as a permanent
dock at the bottom of the screen like this:

http://bagu.org/scratch/gok-in-gnome-shell-2.png

I don't know much about how gnome-shell works yet, so I'm not sure how
Python or C gok would communicate with the gok presentation layer in
gnome-shell. Or even how the gnome-shell gok presentation layer would
transition to Python or C gok in the workspace. This area needs more
exploration and is an open question for me.

That's all I have for now. Any thoughts / comments are greatly appreciated.

Cheers, Ben