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Re: [orca-list] Possibly Forking Gnome 2

Hi,
But, not contacting them and at least giving them the chance to do so coud mean you are losing out on a great opportunity to share the difficulties of maintaining the  fork. I know that past experience may show that it is unlikely you will get desired results, but that doesn't mean the attempt shouldn't be made. If nothing else, it keeps the idea of accessibility out there and that can be helpful all by itself. So, if you do contact the maintainers of mate and get rejected, then by all means create your own fork.
thanks
Storm
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Type O Negative


On Mon, 2011-09-05 at 17:39 -0400, Thomas Ward wrote: 
Hi Alex,

That's my concern as well. While I could in theory contact whoever is
in charge of Mate I just don't know how receptive they'd be to
maintaining accessibility long term. Especially, the kind of
commitment and long term development I have in mind in terms of
getting 100% access to all apps, features, and adding other assistive
technologies to the desktop like voice recognition for those with
motor impairments. In my experience most sighted developers just don't
understand what we need in terms of accessibility. Most are of the
opinion they can just patch it and forget it, but true accessibility
doesn't work that way. Accessibility has to be in the design from the
very beginning and it has to be a primary design goal, or it just
doesn't achieve 100% access. Sadly though we have seen all too many
times how mainstream developers handle accessibility. As soon as
Oricle took over Sun they canned Willy Walker who was a primary
contributer to Gnome and Orca accessibility. It was a pretty clear
statement to me what their intentions are in continuing funding and
supporting the future of Gnome accessibility. I think we need is a new
project leader who can't be canned, and someone who knows exactly what
accessibility means to blind and other disabled computer users. That's
why I am thinking of appointing myself that position.

I'm totally blind, and have been using assistive technologies for
roughly 15 years. I am a skilled C/C++ developer, and have experience
with open source development tools. About the only thing I don't know,
which I can learn, is all the ins and outs of the Gnome source, and
haven't explored the relationship between the assistive APIs and
Gnome. So certainly if I do this I'd have to read quite a few design
docs and API documentation before forking the Gnome desktop, but it
certainly could be done. I certainly have the time and programming
experience to do something like this though.

Cheers!




On 9/5/11, Alex H. <linuxx64 bashsh gmail com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> While I can see contacting whoever's in charge of Mate and seeing if
> they'll care more about a11y, they might not be willing/understand
> thoroughly what the deal is. At this point, I say if you've got the
> resources and can devote some time to it, Do it. Others may jump on
> board and finally, we'd have a up-to-date, streamlined and fully
> accessible desktop. Still, it wouldn't hurt to contact the Mate devs
> and see what they have planned, maybe you won't have to double the
> effort and possibly risk getting tired of developing your own fork.
> This is usually what happens to good forks, people get sick of working
> on them for whatever reason, and they die. I just hope whatever
> happens, it's not that. I really don't like GNOME3 either, and Unity
> is just a mess IMHO. GNOME2 worked fine, but they went and fixed it
> anyway.
>
> Alex
>
> On 9/5/11, Thomas Ward <thomasward1978 gmail com> wrote:
>> 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
>>> --
>>> Vinux Publicity Coordinator: http://www.vinuxproject.org/
>>> Registered Linux user number 508465: http://counter.li.org/
>>> My blog, Thoughts of a Dragon: http://www.stormdragon.us/
>>> How many Internet mail list subscribers does it take to change a
>>> lightbulb?
>>> http://goo.gl/eO4PJ
>>> "One more time we stare into the blackened sky, for tonight, in our
>>> hearts
>>> now we feel. One last time see our destiny reveal."
>>> DragonForce
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> 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.
>>>> The manual is at
>>>> http://library.gnome.org/users/gnome-access-guide/nightly/ats-2.html
>>>> The FAQ is at http://live.gnome.org/Orca/FrequentlyAskedQuestions
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>>>> http://live.gnome.org/Orca/FrequentlyAskedQuestions/NetiquetteGuidelines
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>>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> orca-list mailing list
>> orca-list gnome org
>> http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/orca-list
>> Visit http://live.gnome.org/Orca for more information on Orca.
>> The manual is at
>> http://library.gnome.org/users/gnome-access-guide/nightly/ats-2.html
>> The FAQ is at http://live.gnome.org/Orca/FrequentlyAskedQuestions
>> Netiquette Guidelines are at
>> http://live.gnome.org/Orca/FrequentlyAskedQuestions/NetiquetteGuidelines
>> Log bugs and feature requests at http://bugzilla.gnome.org
>> Find out how to help at http://live.gnome.org/Orca/HowCanIHelp
>>
>
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