Comment 4 for bug 692996

Hi Charlie, thanks for your work on this!

I don't think bugs 209900 and 662630 are an obstacle for having an /etc/init.d script for the following reasons:

1) It is not a major problem Festivals audio backend does not work in Ubuntu. In fact Festival should not even attempt to have such a backend. TTS system should just generate speech in an audio file or stream and it should be up to the target application to choose a way to play it. I would consider closing bugs 209900 and 662630 by simply deprecating these functionalities.

2) Speech Dispatcher just retrieves audio stream and then plays it using its own audio output subsystem, which is common for all available TTS systems.

3) Users who want to just synthesize and speak some text from command line should use spd-say instead of the synthesizers directly, developers who want to voice their applications should use SSIP (the Speech Dispatcher API) or one of the convenienece libraries, not contact the TTS system directly. This is also important for message coordination etc.

4) The above bugs are present whether festival is launched as a server or directly from commandline.