[orca-list] Heads up: Major changes coming in Master

[Joanmarie Diggs <jdiggs igalia com>]

Hey all.

There are some deprecations on the horizon in GNOME Accessibility. The
most notable one is that "focus:" events are going away because they are
redundant to the newer "object:state-changed:focused" event. This
deprecation is a good thing for Orca because it means for any given
focus change, we'll have fewer events to process. Getting fewer events
means having better performance.

I was hoping that this deprecation would be quick and easy in terms of
the Orca code. However, I soon discovered that the bulk of Orca's code
is depending on "focus:" events and actually has hacks and other code
designed to examine, work around, and sometimes ignore events we care
about on the basis that a "focus:" event would come along. Believe it or
not, this in the long run is also good news because these hacks can be
removed and removing them will also give Orca better performance. In
addition, in some cases removing the hacks is resulting in bugs being
fixed. Hacks are never a good thing....

Having said that.... In the short term what this means is that much of
Orca's core code is going to have to be changed. That brings me to the
following: Given the size of this change and the likelihood that
regressions will be introduced, I have made this work my top priority so
that it will be done early enough in the 3.11/3.12 cycle so that you can
test. I also plan to commit the changes in small bits so that it is
easier to pin down what change introduced a regression. For those of you
able to test Orca master, please do so now and continue doing so in the
weeks to come. (This is not a one-week-only change.)

If you discover a bug that is present in Orca master that is not present
in Orca 3.10.x, please let me know ASAP. But if the bug is present in
both master and 3.10.x, please only let me know if it's a crasher.
<smiles> Let's get this uber-change completed first, celebrate the
improved performance that will result, and then we can resume normal bug
fixing.

Thanks in advance with your help with this!
--joanie