a11y in Feisty testing by default

[Sebastien Bacher]

Le lundi 27 novembre 2006 à 18:12 +0100, Henrik Nilsen Omma a écrit :
> Hello,
> 
> Upstream Gnome has been discussing switching on the AT-SPI accessibility 
> framework by default in test builds of Gnome. 

And they did it:

"libgnome 2.17.0

What's new since 2.16.1

* Enable a11y by default in devel releases (Fer)"

And I've desactivated that code when I packaged the new version (reason
following)

>  * Running AT-SPI can cause crashes in other applications like 
> OpenOffice (bug #35313)

Let's be clear, when a11y is activated a lot of crashers happen. It's
frequent than we get crash on random applications happening only when
gail is used by example. 
One other example of annoying bug:
https://launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/+source/gnome-terminal/+bug/58068
"can't open new tabs (with a11y turned on)"

We get already get too many desktop bugs for the number of people
working on them at the moment and GNOME upstream is already bug flooded
by Ubuntu too with the new bug-buddy, making a move toward getting a lot
of new crashers is probably not a right move at the moment. 
We desactivated the GNOME code to make critical warnings crash for the
same reason. It would also be annoying for users who would have to face
those

> But that's for the future ... For now we should decide on the simple 
> question of general testing of AT-SPI in Feisty unstable. I think it is 
> reasonable to ask our testers and developers to try AT-SPI by default. 
> This group likely has more beefy hardware and a higher tolerance for 
> bugs than we can expect from our users.

Unstable users usually don't like bugs that much neither. Usually the
GNOME desktop is quite usable during an unstable cycle too. It has some
rough edges but it's far to be crash land. If we push for extra
debugging we should be quick to fix problem pointed too or people will
be really annoyed. Do we have a team ready to work on those bugs? Daniel
did spend some time on that sort of problems before edgy because nobody
else worked on them during the unstable cycle. People interested by a11y
should probably start by fixing the known problems before we start any
extra testing on that front


Cheers,

Sebastien Bacher