gentoo dropping speakup support

[Doug Sutherland]

I still wonder about the usb console in relation to speakup.
The kernel already has support to direct console to usb 
rather than serial port, and has had this capability for a 
long time, yet we still can't use usb serial adapters with 
speakup because the code assumes hardware serial 
port. My understanding is that with usb serial console 
you may miss a bit of the initial boot messages, but I 
wonder how it might work if speakup was in user space
and we could use usb serial adapters. We'd miss a few
of the initial boot messages but enable more widespread
use of speakup. One way or another this usb problem 
needs to be sorted out. I have heard it mentioned by 
someone, I forget who, that a hybrid solution might 
be the answer, some kernel space and some user.
It could be argued that a lot of what happens with 
speakup is application code, and if the line was drawn
between actual hardware drivers and application code
then there would be better chance of getting speakup
into the official kernel. And this, of course, would be 
the best thing to happen. If it was all in the kernel with
no patches required then there would be none of this
discussion about gentoo or ubuntu not supporting it.
But presumably the whole thing would have to be 
re-written. I can think of another reason to do this
hybrid idea, to enable getting speakup beyond x86
and into ARM for example. There is no ISA bus 
there and interrupts are completely different. If it 
was well engineered as hybrid, with a "port" being
generically abstracted in the application code, then
it would not matter if the actual port was ISA or 
PCI card or USB or firewire, or some other thing
that hasn't been invented yet.

I have an interim suggestion though. Couldn't one
make a small root filesystem that loads speakup 
like as a rescue CD, but not a CD, on the hard 
drive, for those situations where the regular distro
isn't speaking for whatever reason? If you always
had a small partition like this bootable with speech
then you could at least boot that and then fix your
full fledged distro if need be. Also wondering if 
anyone has tried using chroot in this sort of way,
booting minimal system with speech and then 
chrooting into the full system.

  -- Doug