Re: gentoo drops speakup

[Gregory Nowak <greg@romuald.net.eu.org>]

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On Mon, Jul 16, 2007 at 05:11:33PM -0500, John Heim wrote:
> Kirk, I know you're busy and I hate to ask but do you think you could give a 
> brief status report? Is speakup ever going to be in the main kernel source 
> tree? Of course, I understand these things take time but I was just 
> wondering if there is a problem.

I'm not Kirk, but from what I understand, speakup isn't in the
mainstream kernel source, because the kernel developers think the code
is badly written, and it doesn't meet their standards.

As for whether or not speakup will be a part of the kernel tree, I
hate to be blunt and direct, but I think the question to ask before
that one as of now, is whether speakup will work ever again or not? I
know all of us would probably say yes, and it probably will, but it
isn't going to magically happen. From what I've seen in the gentoo bug
description, the main show stopper now is speakup's serial code, and
as far as I can tell, fixing that will mean either rewriting how
speakup probes for a serial synth (which doesn't sound and probably
isn't simple), or putting a part of, or all of speakup into user
space.

No, I'm not volunteering. Like a couple of people here said, I too have
looked at the speakup code in the past. While I have a vague inkling
of what's happening, I don't understand enough about kernel internals
myself to write the same thing from scratch, or probably to even
attempt successfully modifying it. Yes, I know I could learn kernel
programming, but that would take time, and time, like many of us,
isn't something I happen to have right now.

Greg


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