Ubuntu-accessibility Digest, Vol 54, Issue 23

[Jon]

Hi,
On Mon 24/05/2010 at 01:18:37, Kenny Hitt wrote:
[snip]
> Actually, that isn't my problem with Gnome.  My problem is lack of 
> stability and slow response. My time in Gnome usually ends when Orca 
> crashes and nothing I try can get it to restart.  At that point, 
> anything in the Gnome session is lost.  My only option is to kill the 
> Xserver and clean up the resulting mess in a console. If Orca were a C 
> program, I would just attach to the process with gdb in a console and 
> wait for the crash. Then I would have a good backtrace to attach to a 
> bug report.  I don't know how to do the same with a Python app.  The 
> debug methods I know about for Orca create large files. Since the 
> crash can take a while to happen, letting Orca write large amounts of 
> data to a file isn't an option.

Most of these crashes occur due to speech-dispatcher, or the poor sound 
integration that ubuntu had for a while, while switching between alsa 
and pulse audio. If you update to Lucid, I believe your experience might 
be far improved.

We try to keep the actual Orca code as clean as possible, performing 
regression testing on regular basis. But because we dont provide the 
actual speech, when the tts crashes/hangs, then sadly often Orca gets 
the blame.

Providing the debug file is very helpful, because then we can 
see exactly what has happend, and at what stage the problem occured, and 
with what parameters. Only then we can try to work with opentts/sd to 
fix the issue, or work around it ourselves.

In any case, we are not asking you to read the debug file, unless you 
want to be involved with locating the problem and thinking about 
possible solutions.

Remember Orca is a community project, and we are all volinteers, so 
every little helps.

Thank you.

-Jon