Hey all, I thought I already blogged about this topic, but found I didn't. Anyway, one of the things I wanted to get done while in Randa was to rename KTTSD (Kde Text To Speech Daemon) to something with a meaning that is pronounceable. It's changed a lot since 4.0 (and 3.5, etc.) so a new name fits. A user suggested the name Kitty on a previous blog post, so I used that for about a day until another developer pointed out that Kitty exists (http://www.kesiev.com/kittyguide/home/) though it seems outdated/unmaintained. The next morning in Randa, we had a brainstorm session with other developers and came up with a few choices. We went with Jovie which happens to be a less commonly known and used name (and is also one of my daugther's name). So new in kde 4.5 Jovie will talk to everyone (if you or your distro setup speech-dispatcher correctly, etc. etc.)
Next step? Move the developer page from accessibility.kde.org about kttsd that's outdated to techbase and update it for D-Bus, 4.x documentation.
6 comments:
I have to say I think naming things with meaningless names is a very bad idea:
1. It discourages new developers - now they have to learn what the hell Jovie, Plasma, Akonadi, and so on actually *are*.
2. These things do crop up in the UI, e.g. in task lists, in the 'something isn't reponding' shutdown dialog. Much better to show "kde_speech is not responding' than 'jovie is not responding'.
I know it's not as fun, but sensible names are much better IMO.
How is "Jovie" more meaningful than "kttsd"? At least kttsd tells you what it does (KDE Text-to-Speech daemon) as it is an acronym. What does "Jovie" mean? How is anyone supposed to know that "Jovie" means TtS?
Please don't rename things using totally unrelated names.
@Tim, Freddie: Your comments have a point, I think, but to the average person, "KTTSD" means nothing, either. In this case, a name that they may have heard before is probably more easy to remember than a technical acronym, even if it has no bearing on the actual product.
Besides, in this context, giving a human name to a speech daemon is probably more memorable than plenty of other things.
As KTTSD is (still?) a thin wrapper around speech-dispatcher plus some bells and whistles, why not call it kde-speech-dispatcher instead?
For the last few days, I've been unable to build kdeaccessibility because of some linking errors in the jovie folder. The KDE3 compatibility stuff was commented out in the CMake config file. I was able to fix the problem by porting the code from K3Process to QProcess (and also adding KDE4_KIO_LIBS to the CMakeLists.txt so that KRun links). What is the best way for me to send you a patch? Does kdeaccessibility use reviewboard?
Thanks,
Robert
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