Considering remaining with CORBA accessibility framework for Ubuntu 10.04, Lucid Lynx.

[Luke Yelavich <themuso ubuntu com>]

Hi all
You may or may not be aware that the planning for Lucid Lynx is now under way. Lucid Lynx will be a long term support release, so many aspects of developing the distro are being done in a somewhat more conservative approach this cycle. Since Lucid will still be shipping GNOME panel et al , which requires bonobo etc, I am seriously considering remaining with at-spi in its current form, i.e using bonobo/orbit, for the single reason that it works well, and changing to the dbus implementation will break existing applications in Ubuntu like gok and dasher, since at-spi over dbus does not yet have a C library for client apps to link to, at least as I understand things.

I would like to hear people's thoughts on whether this is the right approach. On one hand, I'd love to move over to the new implementation of at-spi, however since this is a long term support release, I really do not want to introduce possible breakage and regressions in some, if not all, use cases. I guess what I am asking for, is a convincing argument to move to at-spi over dbus. I am also interested from a distro packager's point of view, as to how easy it is to transition over. If its not much work to transition, and I can make the change early in the lucid cycle, to allow for testing, then I will certainly give weight to using at-spi over dbus, but as I've said, I am concerned about breaking otherwise working applications, especially in a long term support release.

Thanks in advance for any thoughts/suggestions you may have.

Luke