Very well composed email Kyle. Thank you Rob Whyte On 24/04/17 06:02, Linux for blind general discussion wrote: > 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 > > _______________________________________________ > Blinux-list mailing list > Blinux-list@xxxxxxxxxx > https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/blinux-list _______________________________________________ Blinux-list mailing list Blinux-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/blinux-list