Bug#1024549: espeakup: crashes during speech synthesis installation, snd_pcm_area_copy assertion failed

[Arnaud Rebillout]

Package: espeakup
Version: 1:0.90-11
Severity: normal
Tags: d-i
User: devel at kali.org
Usertags: origin-kali

Dear Maintainer,

This bug was first reported in the Kali Linux installer, and it can be
reproduced in the Debian daily installer image [1].

The speech synthesis installation starts fine, but at some point,
there's no more sound. Therefore I open another console, type 'ps', I
can see that espeakup is not running. There's nothing in
/var/log/espeakup.log (the file is empty).

So I restart the process with additional debug argument:

  espeakup --alsa-volume -V en --debug

Back to the installer, the sound is back, I keep installing, until at
some point, it goes silent again. Back to the console, I can see that
espeakup crashed:

  espeakup: pcm.c:3237: snd_pcm_area_copy: Assertion `dst < src || dst >= src + bytes' failed.
  Aborted

It's fairly easy to reproduce, for me it crashes every time, although it
doesn't always crash at the same moment of the installation. The exact
moment when it crashes seems quite unpredictable.

Note that I'm running the iso in a QEMU VM on an up-to-date Debian Sid,
so that's qemu-system-x86 7.1+dfsg-2+b2 and linux-image-amd64 6.0.8-1,
in case it matters.

I'l try to debug further, but I'm not familiar with these low-level
bits. The assertion error happens in the alsa-lib source package (binary
package libasound2 is my guess), as you might have noticed. I really
have no clue how to debug that.

Best regards,

Arnaud

[1] https://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/daily-builds/daily/arch-latest/amd64/iso-cd/