I think you misunderstand the way TalkingArch works. TalkingArch has
very minor modifications to offer speech and braille output out of the
box, but TalkingArch is essentially just Arch. There is no need for more
developers, as we just take the official Arch iso and make very few
modifications to it. We maintain a single package, (brltty-mimimal),
which removes dependencies on X and other things that aren't needed in
an official Arch installation and work around some sound issues by
unmuting the sound cards and playing a recorded message and beeps when
multiple cards are detected, and all that was done before Kelly and I
started maintaining it. No, TalkingArch is *not* a specialized distro;
it's a modified ArchLinux iso that talks and outputs braille out of the
box. Once installed, the end user has nothing on his/her system but pure
Arch. This is what we offer in TalkingArch and nothing more. In reality,
it only takes about 5 hours each month to keep TalkingArch working, and
most of that is build and upload time.
Sonar and Vinux on the other hand are both specialized, as once
installed, the end user sees a modified Linux operating system that is
different from the parent. In the case of Sonar, the parent was Manjaro,
which forked from Arch, so was already different, and in the case of
Vinux, the parent was Ubuntu, which is based initially off of Debian, so
is also different from its upstream. Once faced with the dilemma of
finding a new parent distro because Manjaro stopped working or merging
with Vinux, which was already facing such a challenge, it made perfect
sense to pool resources and merge with Vinux. The good thing is that
Vinux will in the near future base itself on a parent distro that has no
other parent and is not a derivative or fork of another distro, meaning
that the immediate upstream is the application developers themselves.
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
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
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
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
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