Hi Folks,
just wanted to give a heads up for all of you who were wondering what's going on with Dogtail as there's been no release for some time and no commits into git Master branch since late 2009. This was due to fact that Dogtail is doing pretty good and is rather stable with GNOME2/GTK2 applications as well as because Zack, the previous developer, couldn't maintain it anymore.
Yet with AT-SPI a11y technologies rewritten to use dbus and coming of GNOME3/GTK3 the times have changed. You might have noticed that current 0.7.0 version simply doesn't work well with GNOME3 in Fedora and elsewhere.
For last couple of months we've been working on porting Dogtail for these new technologies so that users of newer systems could benefit from it again. We plan to release an 0.8.0 out of the new 'gtk3' git branch you can already checkout, while keeping 0.7.0 alive for use on older systems. These two most likely won't be compatible. But don't worry! Do you have a GNOME2 system like older Fedora, Ubuntu, RHEL or CentOS? Go for 0.7.x. Do you have bleeding edge Fedora, Ubuntu, Mint installed? Go for 0.8.x!
The port is currently in alpha stages, still needing some fixes and testing, but you can already try it out and it might even work for you. Fedora users can use this unofficial yum repo [1] to get the 0.8.0 alpha. All the others, just checkout the source code: "git clone git://git.fedorahosted.org/git/dogtail.git", go to the gtk3 branch: "git checkout gtk3" and run the install script as root: "python setup.py". I will be very glad for any help! There are some known issues, mostly with tools. Notably, Sniff still lacks the UI highlighting and working context menus (a top priority now) and the script-recorder hasn't been touched yet. Other than that, dogtail 'itself' is relatively good to go.
We are currently obtaining the administrator rights for the Trac (so we can update the home page) as well as downstream Fedora access. Of course, we'd like to put 0.8.0 into Fedora repos by the time it's released (hopefully in time for F17)!
Cheers, Vita
-- Vita Humpa Desktop QE @ Red Hat
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