[Tts-project] Bug#1140823: festival: should not depend on alsa-utils

[Russell Coker]

Package: festival
Version: 1:2.5.0-13
Severity: normal

https://wiki.debian.org/Festival

The wiki documents it's use for writing a wav file to disk, there are many
potential uses for it that don't involve local sound output such as sending
audio from a web server for example.  I think a recommends is a reasonable
option here.

The default /etc/festival.scm uses "aplay" from alsa-utils to play audio,
that can easily be configured to use "paplay" from pulseaudio-utils or
"pw-play" from pipewire-bin so depending on
alsa-utils | pulseaudio-utils | pipewire-bin would also be a reasonable
option.

The counter argument to this would be "pulseaudio and pipewire both provide
an ALSA interface so an ALSA program can talk to all three".  But I think
that as both KDE and GNOME depend on pipewire-bin the vast majority of
systems will have a more recent sound system installed and not wanting to
have alsa utilities installed is quite reasonable.

Even going a single step up and depending on pulseaudio-utils would be a
step up.

In Testing the only packages that depend on alsa-utils are festival
and reform-desktop.

-- System Information:
Debian Release: forky/sid
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)
Foreign Architectures: i386

Kernel: Linux 7.0.12+deb14.1-amd64 (SMP w/18 CPU threads; PREEMPT)
Kernel taint flags: TAINT_CPU_OUT_OF_SPEC, TAINT_WARN
Locale: LANG=en_AU, LC_CTYPE=en_AU (charmap=ISO-8859-1), LANGUAGE not set
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /usr/bin/dash
Init: unable to detect

Versions of packages festival depends on:
ii  adduser        3.157
ii  alsa-utils     1.2.15.2-3
ii  libc6          2.42-17
ii  libestools2.5  1:2.5.0-14+b2
ii  libgcc-s1      16.1.0-2
ii  libstdc++6     16.1.0-2
ii  libsystemd0    261-1
ii  sgml-base      1.31+nmu1

Versions of packages festival recommends:
pn  festvox-kallpc16k | festival-voice  <none>

Versions of packages festival suggests:
pn  festival-freebsoft-utils  <none>
pn  pidgin-festival           <none>

-- debconf-show failed