[orca-list] A bit more about the 3.1.90 release: General Issues and Direction

[Joanmarie Diggs <joanied gnome org>]

Hey all.

Regarding the 3.1.90 release, there have been a number of questions
both public and private, along with a number of things I would like to
tell you. Rather than send one uber-mail, I'm going to break these up so
that different people can read the message(s) which apply to their
needs.

* The Gtk+ deprecation work (i.e. using GtkGrid instead of GtkTable,
  GtkHBox, GtkVBox, and GtkBox is all about making Orca's GUI components
  (e.g. Orca's Preferences dialog) compliant with GNOME's expectations.
  It has nothing whatsoever to do with how Orca presents those objects
  when it encounters them (i.e. Orca will still work as expected with
  "old" Gtk+ apps.

* The reason we went from a .5 version to a .90 version is because that
  is what GNOME did and does. Often there's a .6 before the .90, but
  this time the release team chose not to do that. And no, I do not know
  why GNOME doesn't have a .7 or a .8 but does have a .91 and .92. But
  that is neither here nor there: The Orca team does its best to follow
  GNOME rules and conventions, whatever those rules and conventions 
  happen to be. <smiles>

* Information on when any given version of the officially-shipping Orca
  (i.e.*not* the orca-xdesktop branch) will be released can be found on
  the GNOME schedule for that release. The current schedule is located
  at https://live.gnome.org/ThreePointOne#Schedule.

* Regarding releases for the orca-xdesktop branch: The reason I did not
  do the parallel orca-xdesktop release the other day was in part due to
  sheer exhaustion resulting from having to pull multiple "all-nighters"
  to get the introspection and GUI work "good enough to merge" in time
  for the 3.1.90 official release. If I had failed to get the 
  introspection work done in time, Orca would no longer function in
  GNOME due to changes made in pygobject. Because the orca-xdesktop 
  version is not official GNOME, I can release it whenever I feel like
  and do not have any obligation to adhere to the aforementioned
  schedule. As a result, my plans are to continue to commit features and
  fixes which apply to that version. If you pull that branch you'll find
  that fixes which are not specific to GNOME 3 are still going in. I'll
  probably do another release of that branch with the .91 release of the
  official branch.

* As for the future of the orca-xdesktop branch and the gui-changes and
  so forth: Once I get fully caught up on the bugs and other issues in
  the official branch (i.e. the introspection fallout), I need to bring
  the xdesktop version back into sync with the official version. For
  instance, the official version now has a 'voices' page to make the
  'speech' page of the preferences dialog less insanely full of options.
  However, the orca xdesktop version cannot depend on Gtk+ 3, use 
  GtkGrid, etc., etc. So my choices seem to be: Re-do the GUI again,
  but using Gtk+ 2 or resume work on making Orca compatible with all
  toolkits (i.e. Gtk+ 2, Gtk+ 3, Qt, and <insert future toolkit here>).
  Doing the latter is what I'm leaning towards. From a technical point
  of view, I had started that work in collaboration with Ale so we're
  already on our way to having it completed. From a practical point of
  view, I need to get us back to having one stable branch and on 
  unstable branch. Having multiple branches is way too much work for
  everyone: For me of course. <smile> But also for the translators
  and anyone wanting to contribute fixes and features. Plus, I would
  really (really, really, really) like to see Orca become the screen
  reader of KDE and XFCE and any other graphical desktop environment
  for *nix. And that, of course, means toolkit independence must be
  implemented.

So... I think that's everything I needed to say on the "general
direction" front. I still need to write up a list of notes for distros
and a list of bugs. That should be coming before too long, so stay
tuned!

Thanks guys! Take care.
--joanie