Document state of the plugin system with current versions of Orca

[C-Loftus]

Hello, thank you for your work on this project. I think it is very interesting and I've been thinking about extending Orca a bit for a while now.

I was looking to write a few plugins for Orca but I wasn't sure if this repo is still the proper way to do it. I saw the last commit is a few years back now so I just wanted to check if there were any recent developments.

In the arch linux wiki the link https://stormdragon.tk/orca-plugins/index.php appears to be dead just as an fyi

Lastly, I just wanted to confirm the distinction between this repo and https://github.com/chrys87/orca-plugin I wasn't sure if that repo is going to be merged upstream or if there are conflicts preventing it.

Thank you very much
-Colton

[stormdragon2976]

Howdy Colton, There is a fork of Orca based on the gnome-45 branch. It incorporates the plugin system, both the libpeas and the simple plugin system. The fork is called Cthulhu, and I would love to have more contributors on the project. If you would like to check it out, it is located at: https://git.stormux.org/storm/cthulhu It is still in the early stages of development, but already has a few users. If you want to join the development team, please let me know.

[C-Loftus]

Hi Storm, thank you for linking that to me. I appreciate it. I will try out cthulhu when I get a chance.

So just to clarify a few things:

• is https://github.com/chrys87/orca-plugin now just developed inside of https://git.stormux.org/storm/cthulhu ?
  • i.e. is development on the plugin system just occurring in cthulhu now and not that other github repo from chrys87?
• has joanie / other folks in the orca community, expressed any goals / thoughts about merging your work upstream?
  • I am very interested in contributing but just wanted to get a better sense of the long term goal of cthulhu. Is it a hard fork or intended to be merged back into mainline Orca?
  • I would love to work on some of this but just want to make sure that it isn't lost or buried in merge conflicts as new orca releases come out

[stormdragon2976]

Howdy Colton, I haven't heard anything from Chrys in a few months, so I'm not really sure of the status of any of his projects. I know the Orca stuff never got merged, and I think he got frustrated by that and hasn't worked on it in a while. Cthulhu is it's own screen reader. There are no plans to try to get any of its functionality merged into Orca. It would probably be rejected anyway. On the other hand, it is perfectly ok to backport stuff from Orca to Cthulhu. The only exception is, I would rather not introduce any of the breaks that lead to me choosing gnome-45 as the forking point. I'm not sure how much of the Orca community knows about Cthulhu yet. I haven't announced it all that wide yet because it's still early in development. It is a hard fork, and features are likely to diverge quite broadly.