Re: Package proposal: greader, an audio emacs reader for blind and dislexic people

[Tim Cross]

I responded to the message because I use an Emacs which converts buffers to spoken text on a daily basis and because I have written a number of speech services, so have some familiarity with the area. I've also made extensive use of both Emacspeak and speechd.el. I suspect there has been few other responses because this is not something which many people want or have thought about. There are also lots of programs out there which can turn text of various formats into speech and probably only a small number of people who would find doing so from within emacs much benefit.

I didn't reject the package. I asked what the package did that was different to existing libraries which I felt provided very similar functionality to what is being proposed.  It still isn't clear to me what the proposed package would add that isn't available in (for example) speechd.el. In fact, the proposed package seems to be a subset of what is available in speechd.el, Rather than having multiple packages that do very similar things, I would rather see that effort all pulling in the same direction on a single package. 

I don't agree that everything should go into GNU ELPA just because it can The thing about GNU ELPA is that all the packages in there are actively maintained and kept up to date with current version of Emacs. The mor packages in there, the more work is required to release new versions of Emacs. IMO the GNU ELPA repository is really for packages that represent core Emacs functionality. For non-core things, we have MELPA, which  sounds like a better fit for this package. 

Regardless, I think the better approach is to first develop and release the package in MELPA. If it becomes popular and the community believes it would be a good fit for GNU ELPA, it can be moved over to that repository. 

On Thu, 31 Jan 2019 at 13:06, Michael Heerdegen <address@hidden> wrote:

Tim Cross <address@hidden> writes:

> speechd.el is not part of core emacs and therefore is not in the GNU
> ELPA repository. It is GPL'd. With something like the package you are
> suggesting, you are probably best off developing it as a separate
> project and once it becomes mature, see what interest there is in
> having it moved into becoming part of the Emacs project. I suspect
> this is unlikely as it isn't core Emacs functionality, but you never
> know. Of course, that doesn't mean it cannot be a GNU project.
>
> BTW, you may want to choose a different name from greader - there have
> been packages in the past called greader, which were interfaces to the
> old Google Reader RSS interface.

I think you are confusing me with Michelangelo, I'm someone else.

I don't know much about the matter, but I wanted to understand why you
rejected the suggested package and why no one else commented.

Maybe it would help us who aren't that familiar with the matter if
Michelangelo could post his suggested package, or a link to it, so that
we know what we speak about.

BTW I had the impression that you objected that Michelangelos package
doesn't use speech-dispatcher, but AFAIU he told that it does.

Anyway, if we haven't something like this yet in Gnu Elpa, if it's
useful, why not add it there.  I didn't mean to add it to the core
distribution of course.


Michael.

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regards,

Tim

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Tim Cross