[Tts-project] Advice/opinions asked about two speech-dispatcher issues

[Paul Gevers]

Hi all,

As you all might be aware of, I am working on getting the latest
speech-dispatcher into Debian. With the recent change I found one issue
I like to discuss. I also like to discuss what I see as a current flaw
in the packaging.

First, with version 0.8 the upstream source moved to the xdg standard
location for local user configuration and run files, i.e. ~/.config/ and
~/.cache/ Unfortunately, they didn't incorporate any backward
compatibility in. This means that anybody that spend time on creating a
non-default configuration, will not see that customization after
upgrade. As the user folder is off-limit for the packaging, this can
only be fixed by either the binary itself, or the user. Currently I tend
to go for a comment in the README.Debian file [1], but maybe somebody
want to try a stab at a migration implementation. What do you think?

Second, I am unsure if speech-dispatcher upgrades are actually handled
gracefully. If speech-dispatcher is already running at the start of the
upgrade, I think it will keep on running and only the new version will
be used after killing speech-dispatcher (via reboot). However,
implementations that interact with speech-dispatcher might be upgraded
at the same time and actually believe they are talking to the new
speech-dispatcher and possibly fail. I can imagine that we could kill
any speech-dispatcher that is running in the postinst script, but I am
reluctant to take that step. What do you think?

Paul
PS. I will update git with my other proposed changes later tonight.

[1] Proposed additional text for README.Debian:
speech-dispatcher (0.8-2) experimental; urgency=low

 * Since speech-dispatcher 0.8 the user configuration is not searched
   and stored in ~/.speech-dispatcher/ but in ~/.config/speech-dispatcher.
   Unfortunately, upstream speech-dispatcher did not implement backward
   compatibility, and due to the complexity of doing that, neither did we.
   If you already have a working user configuration, we suggest to manually
   fix this by either moving the configuration files, making appropriate
   symlinks or running spd-conf to generate a fresh configuration.

 -- Paul Gevers <elbrus at debian.org>, Tue, 14 Jan 2014 21:46:02 +0100

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