Re: [orca-list] Who else is looking to contribute?

[Luke Yelavich <themuso ubuntu com>]

On Tue, Mar 11, 2014 at 08:56:16PM EST, Mike Dupont wrote:
> Hi all orca users and devs,
> am I the only one here who is trying to contribute? Is there anyone else on
> this list who has had contributions ignored?
> I have looked at the commit log and it seems to be dominated by only very
> few people,
> lets start a discussion on how to get more people committing.

As is often the case with bigger projects, this is one instance where just understanding Orca's code is only 
part of the picture. You also need to have an understanding of the underlying at-spi and atk frameworks, and 
how they work in making applications accessible. You also need to understand how Orca is doing a lot of what 
it does. There are python bindings for at-spi, but Orca also uses other parts of the GNOME desktop, and these 
are accessed using GObject introspection. GObject introspection is essentially a wrapper around the C 
libraries that GNOME uses, i.e GTK, and GLib. I suggest you look up the GObject documentation to learn about 
what GObject is, as I don't feel I can give a reasonable explanation.

Orca is event driven, in that it sets up a bunch of callbacks for various events from the at-spi registry. It 
then enters an at-spi registry loop where events are triggered, and Orca's methods are called based on the 
events it listens to.

The best API reference is the C library APIs, unless GNOME now has a way of generating deacent documentation 
for GObject introspection consumers like python. There is also the python at-spi bindings, however at-spi's 
documentation again refers to the libatspi C API.

I hope this makes things a little clearer to those who wish to contribute, and I'll do my best to answer any 
questions you have, but I myself only partly know Orca's code base.

Luke