How to try the new versions of speakup

[Chris Brannon]

Zahari Yurukov <zahari.yurukov at gmail.com> writes:

> I've tried it once, and as far as I know, it can't be build without a
> copy of the entire kernel source, though  I may miss something, cause I
> don't know how you've build speakup before.

You usually don't need the whole source to build out-of-tree modules.
What you do need are the headers and other infrastructure.  On Arch
Linux, this stuff is available in a package called linux-headers, or
linux-lts-headers (for people who use the LTS kernel).
The package name is going to vary by distro.

> What branch is that? Is it the same, as stated on linux-speakup.org?
> Cause when I wanted to test the unicode patches, I tried several
> branches, until they applied cleanly on the v4.10 branch, and then I
> continued to reapply the new patches on this branch.

Looking at the Speakup website just now, the repository location seems
correct.  Apparently we don't mention the branch name.  I believe it's staging-next?

> So I did this once, and then I've excluded the kernel from updates for
> several months, but then I've decided that's not very good idea, so I
> wrote a simple script, which growed since. 
> Actually, I shared it here last summer, but apparently I must have
> signed my message, so... :)
> Here's the script:
> https://github.com/zahyur/speakup-installer

Nice!  Thank you!

> A key thing is the kernel version in the Makefile I've discovered that
> if speakup was build with a different version in mind, it won't load. I.
> e., different than the version you want to load it into.

Right.  It needs to be kept in sync with the rest of the kernel.
Also with building things straight out of git, I'd worry about
coupling between Speakup and other code.  So if you have a
v4.10 kernel from your distro, what happens if you try to build just the
Speakup modules straight out of git?
The safest bet still seems to be to build the whole kernel.

-- Chris