gentoo drops speakup

[John Heim]

> This isn't big news, speakup works just fine the way it is up to and
> including 2.6.21.6. I would not be at all surprised therefore if
> slackware were to drop speakup by their next release, if the current
> issues with speakup weren't fixed by that time. It would surprise me
> greatly though to see a distro's team of maintainers take it upon
> themselves to cure speakup's serial code and other problems, just so
> they could include a speakup-patched kernel in their next
> release. Note, I am not saying myself that speakup has problems, I
> haven't looked at the code for a while. I'm just repeating what others
> have said on this in the past, so no flames if you please.

I would like to know what, if anything, can be done to get the resources 
allocated that are needed to fix this problem. Could the kernel development 
team fix it if they wanted to? What determines their priorities and where 
does the development time come from?

I wonder if it would help to draw attention to the problem. What is the NFB 
doing about this? They are always talking about jobs. It seems to me that a 
lot of jobs for blind people depend on speakup.   It's conceivable that a 
group like the NFB might even be willing to put up enough money to have 
somebody work on it for 3 months  or 6 months or whatever it would take to 
fix the problem. Who knows? It might be worth exploring anyway.

But maybe I'm out of bounds. I don't want to step on anybody's toes. I don't 
think it would be worthwhile for me to volunteer to work on the code. But if 
I can help in some other way...