[orca-list] Orca's "xdesktop" branch

[Joanmarie Diggs <joanied gnome org>]

Hey all.

A number of people have asked me recently what my plans are with respect
to Orca's "xdesktop" branch, so I figured it was time to make an
announcement.

For those of you unfamiliar with this branch, it was created during the
GNOME 3.0 release cycle due to the fact that GNOME 3.0 had a number of
non-trivial accessibility issues. I wanted users to be able to stick
with GNOME 2 for another release and still get the latest Orca fixes and
features. Beyond this, I was concerned that people interested in using
other desktop environments (e.g. KDE and/or XFCE) would have
compatibility issues running the official version of Orca. 

Now GNOME 3.2 is out, and it's much more accessible than 3.0.
Additionally, any distro which has a fully accessible Qt or XFCE is also
going to have everything needed to run the latest official version of
Orca. So that leaves people who, for whatever reason, continue to use
GNOME 2.

With this in mind, the plan for Orca's "xdesktop" branch is to maintain
it for at least one more release cycle, but as a stable branch. In other
words, I will commit low-risk bug fixes to it and periodically do a
release. But all active development and new features will only go into
master. I hope this is acceptable to everyone.

If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to ask.

Take care.
--joanie