Re: [orca-list] Possibly Forking Gnome 2

[Thomas Ward <thomasward1978 gmail com>]

Hi Storm,

Yeah, I heard something about the Mate fork, but I've got personal
reasons of my own for creating my own fork of Gnome 2. For one thing I
feel if I personally take charge of a new fork I can insure and
maintain maximum accessibility as that will be first and foremost on
my list of things to do where a sighted dev might not be too concerned
about that. The other reason is that I personally have some creative
ideas where to take the Gnome desktop, ideas for a new sweet of
accessible apps, and want to give the Gnome 2 desktop a personal make
over. In other words I want to do more than just fork it I want to use
Gnome 2 as the basis of a new desktop that will compete with Gnome 3
and KDE. This is the power of an open source project like Gnome in the
first place.

I can take a stable desktop environment like Gnome 2, fork it, and
then modify it to suit my needs. I can rename it, add new features,
improve accessibility, customize it, and release my desktop
environment as an alternative to the existing desktops. In short, the
power of open source is the freedom to customize an existing software
product and rerelease it to the open source community as a new
software product. I think that's worth doing with Gnome 2. Especially,
if I actually carry out some of my ideas for the make over.

Cheers!


On 9/5/11, Storm Dragon <stormdragon2976 gmail com> wrote:
> Hi,
> Gnome2 has already been forked. The project is called gnome mate. It
> would be cool if someone got in to it in the early days and kept up with
> the accessibility side of things. So this might be exactly what you are
> looking for.
> HTH
> Storm
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>
>
> On Mon, 2011-09-05 at 15:57 -0400, Thomas Ward wrote:
>
> > 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.
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> > Visit http://live.gnome.org/Orca for more information on Orca.
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> > http://library.gnome.org/users/gnome-access-guide/nightly/ats-2.html
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