[orca-list] XFCE update

[Joanmarie Diggs <joanied gnome org>]

Hey guys.

Due to the impending code freeze and bug reports coming in now that
Ubuntu is shipping post-introspection, post-gui-changes Orca, that is
where most of my attention has been focused. However, I did take the
time over the weekend to write up some step-by-step instructions on
building XFCE from source. The reason I've not yet made them available
is due to that age-old catch-22: In order to access the GUI option to
enable accessibility support, you must first enable accessibility
support. And neither of Orca's unstable branches can do that for you
because orca-xdesktop expects gconf and orca master expect gsettings.
That's the bad news.

Here's the good news: While pondering how best to solve the bad news,
I noticed Mike Gorse recently committed a change to AT-SPI2 so that
there is now a desktop-agnostic means to ask if accessibility support
has been enabled, and -- the more recent change -- to enable it if
not. In other words, thanks to these changes there will be no need to
worry about gconf versus gsettings versus xfconf versus whatever KDE
uses versus whatever LXDE uses etc. We simply need those desktop
environments to pay attention to it.

Even better news: Tonight, one of the core XFCE developers took a
brief look at what needs to be done within XFCE, and he seems to think
it will be easy. Furthermore, the original proposal for this new
accessibility activation functionality came from Frederik Gladhorn
(aka a core Qt accessibility guy) so I'm guessing we'll soon find it
in place there -- if it is not already in place. We really are going
to have the ability to use whatever desktop environment(s) and
applications we want. It's about time. <smiles happily>

Anyhoo, as a result of all the above, my plans are now roughly as follows:

1. Continue working on the post-introspection, GUI-change bugs to get
them all resolved by code freeze.

2. Add support for the new accessibility activation to Orca master.
Ideally also in time for code freeze.

I'll cross the "what about orca-xdesktop?" bridge later. However, my
gut is telling me that this new functionality (which requires bleeding
edge at-spi2) is simply not going to be compatible with the
orca-xdesktop branch until introspection gets added to that branch,
and that means also adding Gtk+ 3, and at that point you're
essentially using master. So why not use master? <smile> In which
case, the thing to do would be to make orca-xdesktop a more stable,
bug-fix branch for people using GNOME 2.x, and focus on ensuring
master is compatible with GNOME 3.x, Unity, KDE, and XFCE. (See item
4.)

3. Once the XFCE developers have made the needed accessibility
activation changes on their end, I'll post all the details on what you
need to do to build and use XFCE with Orca from master. (In other
words, if you wait a tiny bit longer the overall process of building
and using XFCE with Orca should be much smoother.)

4. Branch Orca for GNOME 3.2 and then resume my work on the
GUI-toolkit independence. In other words, we'd have a single GUI and
code which renders that GUI in Gtk+ or in Qt depending on the
environment. That way, not only will we have access to all these great
environments, we'll even look like we belong there. <smiles>

So.... That's it for now. Thank you for your patience with all this!

--joanie