[orca-list] Flag day for Orca

[Willie Walker <William Walker Sun COM>]

Hi All:

We're making some needed structural changes to the Orca code base that 
will have an impact on the speech generators, the braille generators, 
and the where am I code.

Ideally, this will not have an immediate impact on you as a user. That 
is, Orca should continue to provide you with the same presentation of 
information that you were getting before these changes.  These changes, 
however, enable users to change the contents and ordering of what Orca 
presents, and also allows users to specify different voices to be used 
for different content with very fine granularity.  This also opens the 
door for adding audio cues down the road.  We plan on using this to 
improve the performance of Orca as well.

So...what does this mean to you?

1) These changes are for the current development release.  They will not 
be backported to any stable releases.  So, that means you will only see 
them on the master branch and they will only go into GNOME 2.27.x 
releases and beyond.  They will not be put into GNOME 2.26.x releases or 
earlier.

2) We're still very early in the GNOME 2.27/2.28 release cycle, so this 
is the appropriate time for us to make these kinds of changes.  As we 
make these changes, we do lots of testing.  These are substantial 
changes, however, so breakages may have accidentally snuck in.  My 
apologies in advance for those issues.  With your patient testing and 
constructive feedback, we will identify and fix the problems before the 
GNOME 2.28 release this fall.

3) The first phase (the speech generator refactor) was checked in to the 
master branch less than an hour ago.  This means that those of you 
pulling from git will see the changes the next time you pull.  If you 
are someone who pulls from git and uses the master branch, please help 
us by testing with the latest code and providing your constructive 
feedback. Ideally, you should notice NO DIFFERENCES.

4) We're not ready to write docs or teach you how to modify the 
formatting yet.  When we're done with all the phases, we hope to write 
something up for you to use.  Please don't ask us how to customize your 
environment until we are done with all the phases.

For the Orca team,

Will