Re: Gail next steps (was Re: GTK and ATK)

[Matthias Clasen <matthias clasen gmail com>]

On Mon, Jun 6, 2011 at 11:17 AM, Piñeiro <apinheiro igalia com> wrote:

>> I don't think we can treat that as a first step and hold off on doing
>> any other fixes until that migration is done.  The migration is a
>> significant undertaking, and will not be finished for 3.2.
>
> Sorry, I didn't want to say that we should hold off any other fix and focus
> just on the migration. Just trying to focus on the current big task defined
> as much as possible.

So, I've discussed the best way forward for this with Benjamin today.
Here is a rough 6-step plan for dealing with the 'gail problem':

0) write tests for accessible implementations
1) move modules/other/gail nach gtk/a11y
2) add tons of private headers for private structs, to share things
3) remove now unnecessary code
4) add a11y features support to core libs (mainly pango) - word
detection, cursor handling etc, share with clutter
5) figure out new interfaces for GTK to expose necessary features to
a11y (and other consumers, such as IM and OSK)
6) get rid of gtk/a11y and atk-bridge and use a generic dbus
marshaller using the new interface

As I've said earlier, some of this is clearly long-term and not
remotely doable for 3.2. But some of it is; at least steps 0-3.

So, here is the rough roadmap for the near future:

This week, Benjamin and Cosimo review and merge all the outstanding
CSS feature branches for 3.2. Then I do a 3.1 release. After that, we
(mainly Benjamin and me, I guess) work on moving the gail code to
gtk/a11y and doing some initial cleanups in master. The goal is to
have things back to a more or less working state (I would expect a11y
to work about as well as it does now, no major improvements yet) by
mid-July, so we can do another 3.1 release with this before Guadec.

Further work on steps 4, 5 and 6 can happen later, and does not block 3.2.


Comments ?