[orca-list] FLAG DAY - Profiles and a new settings manager

[Alejandro Leiva <aleiva emergya es>]

Hey all.

We have just committed a very, very significant change to master: The
long-awaited Profiles feature, along with a new settings manager. The
new functionality and vastly-cleaned up code were badly needed. But
the work touched pretty much every module within Orca.

What this means for you:

1. Orca master may be quite unstable. We hope not. We've done quite a
few manual tests and regression tests on the branch. But we could have
missed something. Or the merge might have not gone perfectly. If you
are able to test, please test that nothing has broken.

2. *Orca* settings are no longer saved in Orca's roll-your-own
fashion; instead, the settings manager has backends. We'll ultimately
have a gsettings backend for GNOME good citizenship. <smile> Currently
we are using YAML. And having a YAML backend means we should be all
set for providing access to other environments like KDE, once the
AT-SPI work has been done for Qt. It also means that, at least for
now, instead of a user-settings.py, you'll have a user-settings.conf.
You should also expect to find yourself in setup the first time you
launch the new Orca.

3. *Application* settings have not been converted over. They will be
hopefully before too long. But everything you know about how
application settings get saved and loaded currently still stands.

4. orca-customizations.py should continue to work. If it does not, it's 
a bug.

5. You can save and load profiles now. How to do so is specified in
our new help content. So we won't spell it out here. Please give it a
try and let us know if either the functionality or the documentation
have any bugs in them.

What's coming next in this area:

1. The ability to switch amongst saved profiles on the fly. That will
give you fast manual language switching.

2. The ability to delete existing profiles.

3. Converting the application settings over to the new backend.

4. Fixing the long-standing bugs related to Orca's settings.

We hope that you find all this new work as exciting as we do. And,
again, we look forward to the feedback and bug reports from anyone who
is able to run Orca unstable/master.

Thanks!
--Joanie and Ale