Re : Re: Sonar GNU/Linux merges with Vinux

Tue Apr 18 14:53:40 UTC 2017

Hi,

Of course you are right saying that we have to recognize that the oriented devs work is helpful and better than a so hard contribution to mainstream.

However this approach, where we build an alternative image of a distro with some specific settings has a risk, we saw with Sonar and, in a less strong measure, Vinux: devs are not numerous, and end up tired. And their effort is not supported enough due to the low number of people. I think if we all could work mainstream, maintaining a quite strong political action in distros, we coule make mainstream improve and become universal. All the more as it may enable to bring aware devs of larger communities, and avoiding to have accessibility regressions, etc. So would have an impact of upstream software, distro decisions, and then a stronger policital influence.

It is the sense of the debian accessibility team.

That is why Hypra chooses to contribute directly to Debian, its repo are just to provide immeidately future improvements or avoid future bugs we could not fix, essentially Libreoffice. The most important specific stuff of Hypra repo, which is just a set of Debian packages installed after the distro is installed, are:
- Orca bindings similar as Jaws or NVDA, because upstream is not ready to include various profiles whereas we are sure it is what expect not-power users (why not providing this in a Debian patch later, we are thinking of this);
- a set of config where Compiz is the window manager, to have in one desktop accessibility for everybody, including persons without disability. This set, I hope, will be in Debian someday, but we could upload Compiz too late and could not then, before freeze and stable, to finish work completely, making test, and proposing it is the default behavior as MATE is when installing from a braille device or a speech synth. But we will work for that as soon as the dev cycle starts again in Debian, with thought about patches, upstream, sync, etc. It is not a trivial thought, hence the fact we had to do our repo waiting for this thought be acceptable by the community.

regards,

Jean-Philippe MENGUAL

HYPRA, progressons ensemble

Tél.: 01 84 73 06 61

Mail: contact at hypra.fr

Site Web: http://www.hypra.fr

----- John G Heim <jheim at math.wisc.edu> a écrit :
> Just fedora? Not vidora or something like that? Hey, if you guys end up 
> calling your distro vidora, I want credit. :-)
> 
> I look at the debate over whether it is better to have a distro for the 
> blind or to work on improving mainstream distros like the debate over 
> barley versus wheat beers. Personally, I prefer barley beers over any 
> and all wheat beers. But if someone wants to brew a wheat beer, it's 
> fine with me and I'd even help out if they asked. It's a matter of good 
> and better. In other words, my opinion is that even if you think it 
> would be better if these developers spent their time on mainstream 
> distros, we should all still recognize that what they are doing is 
> really helpful.  Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
> 
> On 04/18/2017 08:45 AM, Jude dDaShiell wrote:
> > Last i read, both sonargnulinux and vinux were in the process of merging
> > into Fedora and that first release was supposed to have happened
> > sometime in April 2017 and would be called Fedora 26.0.  What has
> > happened since then I do not now know.
> >
> > Sent from BlueMail <http://www.bluemail.me/r> for iPhone
> >
> > On Apr 18, 2017 at 6:32 AM, Tony Baechler <tony at baechler.net
> > <mailto:tony at baechler.net>> wrote:
> > Sorry for the late reply, but see comments below.
> >
> > On 3/16/2017 3:36 PM, Joel Roth wrote:
> >> Eric Oyen wrote:
> >>
> >>> ...we, as a community, don't have an actual unified distro
> >>> to call our own. Sure, Vinux is a decent distro, but it's
> >>> lacking a lot of useful features outside of accessibility.
> >
> > OK, but why do we, as a community, need a special distro? Yes, it's free
> > software, so there is certainly nothing stopping you as long as you realize
> > it's your pet distro along with the about 300 others on distrowatch.com
> > <http://distrowatch.com>. I
> > would much rather have a popular, mainstream distro which includes great
> > accessibility like Debian and derivatives.
> >
> >>
> >> I'm not sure how things are at present, but in the past,
> >> Debian has shown some commitment to supporting
> >> accessibility[1], including at the installer level[2].
> >
> > Yes, Debian still supports accessibility. Every alpha release of D-I has
> > accessibility features and fixes.
> >
> >>
> >> This is not the same as a special-purpose distribution, and
> >> I think the pages were written some time ago. Still I would
> >> think that some effort would be worthwhile, and would
> >> benefit all Debian derivatives, which could include
> >> a accessbility-centric distribution.
> >>
> >> 1. https://wiki.debian.org/accessibility
> >> 2. https://wiki.debian.org/accessibility#Debian_installer_accessibility
> >
> > These pages should be fairly current and are often updated by Debian
> > developers like Samuel Thibault.
> >
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