gentoo dropping speakup support

[Doug Sutherland]

Speakup does use modules, and it can be statically compiled 
into kernel instead. That's not a problem. The serial ports, 
however only support real serial ports, not usb-serial, which 
is becoming a problem.

As I said a few months ago, the whole usb mess can be 
statically compiled, including the usb core, the host controller, 
and even usb-serial devices audio devices, and synth drivers, 
like the dtlk for example, so in theory it should be possible to 
boot and get speech output, with changes to speakup.

As it is now, the code refers to the standard serial port 
addresses and irqs, and the communication code is RS232 
specific. 

So this what I mean about abstraction. An abstract interface 
does not implement anything, it only defines. The implementation 
can be anything as long as it follows the interface. So basically 
there needs to be a layer of code in between the serial port code
and the code that writes to it, one interface with several 
implementations, RS232 serial, USB serial, and potential for any 
other kind of implementation. And my argument was that the 
same could be done on the user side, pressing a certain key does 
some thing, currently assumed to be standard keyboard, but 
would be nice if abstract interface where the keyboard is one type 
of controller, other devices could trigger same. I'm mostly thinking 
about mobile pervasive systems, where you might want to read a 
message or email, not type, and your device is in your pocket. So 
you have a little controller sort of like a game pad where you can
move between messages and read them etc, or get phone numbers 
from a list. If the interface to the synth is generic then there are all 
kinds of  possibilities.

I will be working on this kind of thing with speech, and I am 
still contemplating whether or not it needs to be kernel space. 
On an embedded device you really don't need to see all the 
boot messages, because it will load kernel from flash and will
always work. If I find a way to adapt this code to work on 
arm then I might use it, but I actually think I could do the same
thing entirely in user space. Boot is much simpler than PC and
very fixed in nature, ie once done it shouldn't change, no need
to support gazillions of types of hardware etc. I like the idea
of being able to hear the console output, but then I might end
up just using usb-serial console and having a microcontroller
providing a terminal function, in other words both the speech
and keyboard functions. If done that way it would possibly 
miss a very small amount of boot messages, but not many. 
It would be the same as using a terminal program with your
PC connected to another PC with usb serial dongle and 
watching the other machine boot. 

  -- Doug