Samuel Thibault samuel.thibault@gnu.org writes:
Hello,
I'd like to emphasize that the braille feature which is discussed about here is *not* general braille access through brltty.
What is being discussed is the tiny braille support embedded in the screen package, which only supports a few TeleSensory and TSI hardware in a quite basic way, and which has not been developped or maintained for years. There is little wonder screen maintainers would rather remove that part of the code: it is unmaintained, and brltty can already access screen content another way, and is developped, maintained etc.
I agree. I have found native screen support for braille displays a few years ago basically by accident during a code browse. While it might historically be interesting that the GNU screen package directly support(s|ed) braille displays, I don't think many (if any) people actually use that. At least on Linux, BRLTTY is superior regarding its functionality and driver support, and everyone knows that. I am not sure about other operating system kernels, but even if we considered *BSDs whigh might be interested in such a feature natively provided by GNU screen, there is virtually no support for current hardware models in GNU screen. So dropping that part of the code seems like a sensible thing to do. The alternative would be to improve it *a lot*.