Central a11y repository

[Linux for blind general discussion]

Tony Baechler here.

Honestly, I don't really have answers to your questions, but you raise good 
points. I installed and played with nix and it's very accessible. It's just 
a suite of command line tools to manipulate packages. It could easily be 
scripted. In fact, the install script just downloads and extracts binaries 
for your system. I saw no support for anything other than x86 and x86_64, so 
no ARM, but the C source looks portable enough.

I wasn't thinking about low memory systems. Ultimately, it's doubtful that 
you could use it on a small system. The memory wouldn't be an issue, but the 
disk space definitely would. Just a minimal install with no packages takes 
221 MB. However, with drives being so cheap, this is hardly an issue, 
especially since ARM isn't officially supported anyway. There is no reason 
why it couldn't be, it just isn't.

Regarding sandboxing, no, I don't think that's it. It modifies the system 
environment to add the "nix store" to the path. Since each package gets its 
own directory, it's impractical to add potentially thousands of directories 
to the system path. It symlinks the binaries somewhere (I haven't quite 
figured out where, but somewhere under /nix) and adds that directory to the 
user's path. You can have multiple environments and switch among them. I 
think your worry about Orca wouldn't be an issue. I guess someone could 
install several different versions of various desktops and create a 
conflict, but even then, they could create a different user environment. I 
haven't tried installing multiple versions of a package, but when I 
installed hello, I was able to run hello from the shell as normal. The only 
time I see sandboxing being an issue is if you use nix-shell which runs an 
isolated shell for you to test or build from source. My server doesn't have 
X, so I can't test this further.

The obvious workaround is to only install the accessibility stack from nix 
and not from the running distro. As an example, it said you could run 
multiple versions of Firefox, but didn't deal with accessibility. I guess 
others would have to look into this further. I think you can still only run 
one version at a time, even if multiple versions are installed. Yes, each 
app has its own dependencies in its own directory. I don't know how it works 
around the same services being launched multiple times, but it uses a custom 
init manager which I haven't looked into yet. Based on a quick look, to me, 
it looks like a better base for a custom distro than Fedora which has no 
great accessibility anyway. While nix says nothing at all about 
accessibility and the nixos distro is probably not accessible, the package 
manager is no different than Arch or most others in that it's just command 
line tools. Obviously, this would need to be investigated further.

On 5/7/2017 8:16 AM, Linux for blind general discussion wrote:
> Just how sandboxed is each application on a system like this? I'm concerned
> about the increase in disk and RAM requirements for such an OS, since the
> concept of shared dependencies is essentially being circumvented using this
> packaging system. That said, the more important issue by far is
> accessibility. There is a high probability that attempting to package
> accessibility in such an environment would effectively sandbox the a11y
> stack so that it would not be able to communicate with the other equally
> isolated applications on the system, thereby causing worse problems than we
> would be trying to solve. The concept of version conflicts would no longer
> be a problem, but the ability to run multiple versions means nothing if
> applications can't efficiently communicate with multiple at-spi instances,
> and if Orca would get confused by so many at-spi instances trying to talk to
> it at once. Would each application also need its own Orca? In this case,
> we're talking about gigabytes of redundant dependencies, which is a huge
> problem on low-storage and low-RAM systems, as well as all these Orca
> instances needing to communicate with speech-dispatcher, which would cause
> other problems.
> ~Kyle