Blind vs. mainstream distros

Sun Apr 23 21:19:41 UTC 2017

Hi,

> Additionally, Fedora is nearly dead center between the Arch philosophy
> of the rolling release, having the latest and greatest at all costs, and
> the Debian philosophy, in which older is better, so the latest changes
> to Orca that make it work better on the web for example, which have been
> available for some time, may not make it into the OS for as long as two

It is not the Debian philosophy. Debian does not say "older is better",
but "stable is better", as known and we know how to deal with a
situation. And an update is possible is if it sure it will not break
anything in stable.

For persons who want to get benefit from an Orca improvement in Debian
stable, installing backport is possible. It mainly works fine, without
problems for the OS stability. But Orca updates may create lots of bugs.
For example, so far, we hoped we would update from 3.16 to 3.22, but
3.22 introduced bugs on the Web and LibreOffice. Ok it's more reactive,
it has improvements, but also regressions. And "basic" users hate
regressions, and upgrading permanently has regressions risks. Except if
we do non-reg tests, as I plan. But it's not done yet.

> years. The 6-month release cycle is perfect, as nothing gets too old,
> and upstream is imported fully and directly at first, with a chance for
> instability and breakage to settle down before a full release, during
> which time, new upstream versions can be integrated into the released
> system if and only if nothing breaks. Meanwhile, any necessary patches

This 6-months cycle is perfect for power-users. Not for elderly persons,
new blind people, etc. which may be disturbed by so frequent changes and
regressions. I don't forget that LibreOffice has not been accessible
since 4.2.6, Firefox introduces many a11y bugs frequently, denounced by
Joanie, and the a11y stack in GNOME has sometimes bugs if release of
each lib is not exactly the same. A11y stack is ser1ral programs (about
15-20). Very difficult, in a short cycle, to ensure they stay without
regressions. And upgrading each 6 months requires some skills,
standalone, and not all users have it. And opposing power users of free
shftware with beginners with Apple or Microsoft programs is not my
dream, even today.

> are, in theory at least, sent back directly upstream to the application
> developers, similar to the way Arch works. And this is not at all the
> endgame. The ultimate goal is to be able to do away with Vinux
> completely, as upstream applications themselves will be perfected so
> that they work with the available accessibility stack, and this will
> eventually filter down into everything from Arch all the way down to
> Debian Stable and CentOS, and even into the various derivatives and
> forks such as Manjaro and Ubuntu. Yes, any chaining is mostly not really

I can agree this point. I just am sure we'd be stronger everybody on a
single workspace, but we probably can do with our respective distros.

Regards,

> a good thing, but we're much closer to the top of the chain now than we
> ever have been, and the endgame is to work at the top of the chain in
> all things.
> Sent from the range
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Blinux-list mailing list
> Blinux-list at redhat.com
> https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/blinux-list
> 

-- 
Logo Hypra 	
Photo Jean-Philippe MENGUAL *JEAN-PHILIPPE MENGUAL**
DIRECTEUR TECHNIQUE ET QUALITÉ*
adresse84, quai de Jemappes, 75010, Paris
téléphone+331 84 71 06 61 <tel:+33%201%2000%2000%2000%2000>
courieljpmengual at hypra.fr
site webwww.hypra.fr
Facebook Hypra <https://www.facebook.com/hyprasoftware/>Twitter Hypra
<https://twitter.com/Hypra_>Linkedin
<https://fr.linkedin.com/in/jean-philippe-mengual-800133135>