[Tts-project] Bug#859926: speechd-up: fails to install

[Dennis Filder]

On Mon, Jan 04, 2021 at 10:02:38PM +0100, Paul Gevers wrote:
> [...]
> > Yes, the "pulse,alsa" user-visible change seems interesting.  But the
> > implementation seems fragile to me: looking in /proc content is deemed
> > to break at some point or another. We've been struck hard by such kind
> > of tinkering in the past, I'd rather not see that happen again :/
>
> Ack. @Dennis, feel free to comment on this too.

I agree with the assessment that depending on /proc is far from ideal,
but I've been running it for a few months now and it's been working
better than I had expected.  However, the issues that I've encountered
so far mostly stem from a lack of integration.  For example, Orca is
started via /etc/xdg/autostart and pulseaudio in some cases via the
user's systemd, which means both are uncoordinated and thus race for
the audio device.  Another issue I've seen under Bullseye is that gdm3
makes its instance of pulseaudio give up control of the audio device
when the user switches to console which then mutes speakup if
speechd-up has already connected to pulseaudio, and there appears to
be no config option to turn that off.

I've also had some cases where speech-dispatcher pegs the CPU at 100 %
for some reason, but I haven't figured out the cause for that yet.
So, if this patch won't make it into Bullseye, it's not going to be
the end of the world.

The reason I started work on this in the first place is that AFAIK
Firefox some time ago dropped ALSA support and now only supports
pulseaudio.  Also to me it seems like the only way to implement
features like automatically picking up a phone call and routing speech
and phone audio to different ears or spatialization of arbitrary sound
sources.

Regards,
Dennis