Enable accessibility by default in development releases?

[David Malcolm <dmalcolm redhat com>]

Currently, a11y is not enabled by default in GNOME, as it has a
performance cost (CPU and memory usage).

But that means that there's a huge amount of code that isn't being
exercised by most testers and developers.

So here's a (possibly crazy) suggestion: during development releases,
enable a11y by default, and during stable releases, disable it by
default.  That way people running jhbuild, GARNOME etc would be running
all of the a11y code, and any bugs in that layer would be discovered
more quickly.

As I understand it, the GConf
key: /desktop/gnome/interface/accessibility determines whether a11y is
on.  The schema for this key is provided by the libgnome tarball; here's
a link to the schema file in CVS (hopefully not too mangled):
http://cvs.gnome.org/viewcvs/libgnome/schemas/desktop_gnome_interface.schemas.in?view=markup

How sane would it be to link that schema.in file so that the key's
default is true for an odd-numbered release and false for an
even-numbered release?  Or to set this up with a boolean in the
configure.in? Or simply to change it back and forward manually? (since
maybe we'd want to disable it by default again in the last development
release before a stable release, in case we've broken the "off" case)

Is this crazy?  Been tried before?

Thoughts?


Dave "trying to undo all the good work on performance-list" Malcolm