Port configuration and automatical startup of user speech dispatcher in distributions

[Hynek Hanke]

Hello,

I've done a little research on the automatical startup
of applications in session and on the proper place
to set environment variables and here is what I've
found:

1) The prefered place to set the SPEECHD_PORT in Ubuntu
seems to be ~/.profile according to
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/EnvironmentVariables

This way the setting is respected everywhere in X as well
as on the text console. Perhaps this is true for other
distributions as well.

I wonder what would be the prefered way of actually
doing it. Would this simple command be enough?

echo "export SPEECHD_PORT=6561" >> ~/.profile

2) Autostart can be accomplished by placing a proper
.desktop file for Speech Dispatcher into ~/.config/autostart/
I'm attaching an example .desktop file bellow.

The relevant sources are:
http://standards.freedesktop.org/autostart-spec/autostart-spec-latest.html
http://live.gnome.org/SessionManagement/NewGnomeSession

This seems to be the prefered way of doing so, so the application
also appears in the gnome-session-properties dialog, can interact
with XSMP etc.

I'll wait for comments and then if we decide it is a good solution,
extend the spd-conf script to perform these two tasks automatically.

One problem with the Autostart in Gnome I think is a lack of granularity.
There are just 5 autostart levels. Speech-dispatcher
belongs to the first one (Initialization), so there won't be
any conflict with Orca (the fourth or fifth one, Applications
or Desktop), but there will be conflicts with Pulse Audio
and perhaps other services in level Initialization. gnome-session-properties
contains order preference in numbers 1 to 100, but I couldn't
find where these come from and how do they interact with the
SessionManagement specification from above.

Another thing is that perhaps ~/.speech-dispatcher/conf should
eventually be moved to ~/.conf/speech-dispatcher/ to conform with
the FreeDesktop specification.

Any comments are welcome.

With regards,
Hynek Hanke


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