[orca-list] heads up/please test

[Joanmarie Diggs <joanmarie diggs gmail com>]

Hey all.

Today I was looking at some performance-related issues in Orca. One of
them is that we regularly spend 0.01 to 0.25 seconds in updateBraille().
We do this automatically, whether the user has braille and/or braille
monitor support enabled or disabled.

So there are two questions:

* Why up to 0.25 seconds? Answer: Some of that seems to be related to
Mozilla bugs and other issues. (We didn't spend that much time when in
other applications.)

* Why are we spending any time whatsoever in updateBraille() if the user
doesn't have braille and/or braille monitor support enabled? Answer:
Yeah.... This is where I decided to start.

Unfortunately, it's not as simple as adding a check in updateBraille()
which returns immediately if braille support is disabled. Doing so winds
up breaking things elsewhere. We need to add checks pretty much anywhere
there is a braille-related call. And that, it turns out, is all over the
place throughout Orca. The majority are in various and sundry scripts
which for often-valid reasons are cobbling together their own braille
presentation.

So....

I opened bug 616848 - Application and toolkit scripts should not call
methods in braille.py. And I've started the conversion. The conversion
is a work in progress which will be committed to master in pieces. The
first chunk has just been committed -- after pylinting, full regression
testing, and a lot of careful examination of debug.outs to be sure the
changes being made were sound. Nonetheless, your testing would be
greatly appreciated.

Please note:

1. Just because you don't use braille doesn't mean you can't test these
changes. Remember, right now Orca's braille functionality is kicking in
everywhere, even if you don't have a braille display connected and even
if you've disabled braille output. The *ultimate* goal is to stop that
from happening. Bug 616848's goal is simply to make it possible for us
to work on the ultimate goal.

2. I can see many of you thinking, "I better test Firefox!" I'm all for
that. But please test the other apps as well. For one thing those other
apps need testing. For another, the chunk I've committed to master
doesn't touch the Gecko script. The Gecko script is currently unchanged.
I'll send out another "heads up/please test" message when I change stuff
for bug 616848 in the Gecko script.

As a reminder, it's extremely helpful when testing if you can verify
that the bug you find does exist in the current revision from master,
but doesn't exist in the previous revision. 

Thanks very much in advance!
--joanie