[orca-list] Possibly Forking Gnome 2

[Thomas Ward <thomasward1978 gmail com>]

Hi everyone,

I thought I'd write the list, and see what your opinions are regarding
an idea I've had for a while now. Also I'd like to get some input from
the Orca dev's themselves as long term this would effect Orca and
desktop accessibility if I decided to go through with it.

Basically, it goes like this. Recently I installed Arch Linux on a
test computer, got Gnome 3 up and running, and to be honest about it
I'm very disappointed in the direction Gnome is going. I really don't
like Gnome 3 at all, and it feels like a lot of things that were
working just fine in Gnome 2 is now broken or changed in Gnome 3. From
what I have read on list I gather I'm not the only one who is less
than satisfied with the way the Gnome project is headed in 3.x.

The problem is, for a blind Linux user like myself, there really isn't
any good alternatives. KDE access is still rather up in the air at the
moment and Xfce is slowly getting there. However, there is no single
desktop out there that compares with Gnome 2 in my opinion. For that
reason I've been strongly considering just doing what open source is
good for and fork the project.

I could in theory just grab the latest Gnome 2.32 source, officially
fork it into an alternative to Gnome 3, customize it, and release it
as a new desktop environment, and then upgrade it manually from there.
However, before I do something that major I'd like to see what issues
there might be with Orca compatibility. I realise that Orca is
officially a part of the Gnome project, and therefore I would expect
development to follow the main branch of the desktop. Although, there
is an xdesktop version now would that continue for some time to come,
or would I also have to fork Orca in order to maintain backwards
compatibility with essentially a custom Gnome 2.x desktop environment?
Any thoughts, suggestions, or comments?

Thanks.