Bug#913453: espeakup fails install and ends in broken state

[Zachary Kline]

Package: espeakup
Version: 1:0.80-5+deb9u2
Severity: important

Dear Maintainer,


   * What led up to the situation?

I was upgrading my stable system with newest packages from mirrors, and espeakup was mentioned as an upgrade candedate.

   * What exactly did you do (or not do) that was effective (or
     ineffective)?

I ran "apt update," and "apt upgrade." Espeakup lost speech mid-way through as the systemd service failed to install properly.

   * What was the outcome of this action?

Espeakup fails to start properly via systemd, instead requiring manual intervention. A transcript follows:

Setting up espeakup (1:0.80-5+deb9u2) ...
update-rc.d: warning: start and stop actions are no longer supported; falling back to defaults
Failed to start espeakup.service: Unit espeakup.service is not loaded properly: Invalid argument.
See system logs and 'systemctl status espeakup.service' for details.
invoke-rc.d: initscript espeakup, action "start" failed.



   *  espeakup.service - Software speech output for Speakup
   Loaded: error (Reason: Invalid argument)
   Active: inactive (dead)
     Docs: man:espeakup(8)

Nov 10 22:22:27 zork systemd[1]: [/lib/systemd/system/espeakup.service:12] Executable path is not absolute, ignoring: sh -c 'modprobe speakup_soft && /usr/bWhat  -V ${VOICE}'Nov 10 22:22:27 zork systemd[1]: espeakup.service: Service lacks both ExecStart= and ExecStop= setting. Refusing.
Nov 10 22:35:55 zork systemd[1]: [/lib/systemd/system/espeakup.service:12] Executable path is not absolute, ignoring: sh -c 'modprobe speakup_soft && /usr/boutcome  -V ${VOICE}'Nov 10 22:35:55 zork systemd[1]: espeakup.service: Service lacks both ExecStart= and ExecStop= setting. Refusing.
Nov 10 22:35:55 zork systemd[1]: [/lib/systemd/system/espeakup.service:12] Executable path is not absolute, ignoring: sh -c 'modprobe speakup_soft && /usr/bdid  -V ${VOICE}'Nov 10 22:35:55 zork systemd[1]: espeakup.service: Service lacks both ExecStart= and ExecStop= setting. Refusing.
Nov 10 22:37:17 zork systemd[1]: [/lib/systemd/system/espeakup.service:12] Executable path is not absolute, ignoring: sh -c 'modprobe speakup_soft && /usr/byou  -V ${VOICE}'Nov 10 22:37:17 zork systemd[1]: espeakup.service: Service lacks both ExecStart= and ExecStop= setting. Refusing.
Nov 10 22:37:17 zork systemd[1]: [/lib/systemd/system/espeakup.service:12] Executable path is not absolute, ignoring: sh -c 'modprobe speakup_soft && /usr/bexpect  -V ${VOICE}'Nov 10 22:37:17 zork systemd[1]: espeakup.service: Service lacks both ExecStart= and ExecStop= setting. Refusing.
Hint: Some lines were ellipsized, use -l to show in full.
dpkg: error processing package espeakup (--configure):
 subprocess installed post-installation script returned error exit status 1
Errors were encountered while processing:
 espeakup

I expected espeakup to upgrade smoothly, particularly since this is a "stable," release. 


-- System Information:
Debian Release: 9.6
  APT prefers stable-updates
  APT policy: (500, 'stable-updates'), (500, 'stable')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)
Foreign Architectures: i386

Kernel: Linux 4.9.0-8-amd64 (SMP w/4 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8), LANGUAGE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash
Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system)

Versions of packages espeakup depends on:
ii  espeak               1.48.04+dfsg-5+b1
ii  init-system-helpers  1.48
ii  libc6                2.24-11+deb9u3
ii  libespeak-ng1        1.49.0+dfsg-11
ii  lsb-base             9.20161125

espeakup recommends no packages.

espeakup suggests no packages.

-- no debconf information