I get this thing about speakup belonging in user space practically every
time I discuss it outside this list. Even with other blind people. I'm
like, okay, if you can tell me how I can get speech during poot, I'm
willing to listen. Or are you telling me that as a system admin, I don't
need access to boot messages? Lets disable everybody's video during boot
and see how they like it.
I think the question of whether it's better to work on a custom distro
for the blind or on fixing mainstream distros is a tough call. The
problem is clearly that a lot of custom distros for the blind have
disappeared once the original developer lost interest. But while they
last, they are probably doing some good. I do think though that on the
balance, it is better to work on fixing mainstream distros. You can have
a greater, longer lasting impact that way.
On 9/19/21 9:09 AM, Kirk Reiser wrote:
Hello Didier: Thank you for the rc script. That's an impressive shell
script. 'grin'
You are of course correct that there is no mention of systemd in the
espeakup source code. My comment was in reference to the systemd
service provided in the espeakup repository. I think I was just
surprised by it more than anything.
Still, as far as I can tell espeakup indebian sid appears to be broken
with some recent upgrades and it seems so are some of the other
distros. There is probably a good chance that how to handle the
stopping and starting of speakup has been dicussed on other mailing
lists I'm not a member of. I am only on two lists, this one and the
blvuug list which is fairly new. If there has been discussion on some
other accessibility lists I would appreciate it if someone would give
me/us a synopsis of those discussions and their
recommendations/decisions.
It also seems to me that we have two different situations wrt distros,
general communities like debian, ubuntu, arch etc and those that are
specially put together for the blind community like debuan, slint and
others I don't remember there names of anymore. I'd kind of like to
know what people think of those situations is it better to be separate
or part of the whole? The inclusion of pulseaudio for example in
packages could make a difference those theose who want it and those
who don't. This is of course an issue that doesn't just have merit to
the accessibility community of speakup. Huh, does anyone use
pcaudiolib other than espeak, just wondering.
The whole question of whether a package should run as root or a
regular user is another interesting question. I don't think that
espeakup would have broken if some group hadn't decided that one way
was better than an other for everybody. Once again personally I like
the idea of running as an individual user but I also want access to
devices from boot-up on and not loading accessibility until a user
logs in is a non-starter there imo.
Anyway I seem to be ranting, sorry about that.
Didier, does slint have a bootable image for the RaspBerry Pi 4B?
Espeakup on raspbian and debian is fucked in completely different ways
on that platform.
Kirk
On Sun, 19 Sep 2021, Didier Spaier wrote:
Hi Kirk,
answering inline.
Le 18/09/2021 à 21:26, Kirk Reiser a écrit :
Huh, are you running arch on that box as well? I am wondering if
speakup is even loaded. I noticed in the espeakup build systemd
services that it loads speakup_soft when the systemd service is
started.
I'm not crazy about that being the way to load speakup particularly
but I'm not that familiar with various distros way of doing things but
it appears the espeakup maintainers figure everyone is running
systemd.
To be clear you mean the packagers of most distributions right? there
is no
mention of systemd in the source code, of course.
As a counter example the daemon manager for Slint is attached.
That's one of the reasons I mentioned getting folks opinions in my
last message to you. For people that don't run systemd it will
certainly break things.
Cheers,
Didier
--
###
John G. Heim, 608-263-4189, jheim@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
