I'm Tony Baechler. See below. On 4/23/2017 1:02 PM, 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.
No, I don't misunderstand at all. Gentoo was the same. You boot the live CD, you get speech and you install Gentoo from the handbook. However, I still call it specialized. If the two of you can't maintain it, it dies. It isn't the same as the original, unmodified Arch. If it is 100% Arch with no modifications, I would say you're right. Debian and Ubuntu don't need to be modified in any way. Both easily let the user start speech at boot and do a normal install. Arch lets you do a normal install, but as you say, it plays a message, unmutes sound, etc. Why can't this be handled upstream? Either have an official Arch .iso with speech or a boot option.
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