[orca-list] Pulseaudio and speech-dispatcher/gnome-speech in Ubuntu.

[Hynek Hanke]

Luke Yelavich napsal(a):
> I don't quite understand. 
The original problem was that installing Dispatcher and configuring 
/etc/defaults/ to execute it will destroy all other audio in Hardy, 
because PulseAudio won't be able to start. This problem is totally 
independent of whether /etc/defaults/speech-dispatcher is set to "yes" 
or "no".

It is not a problem of Speech Dispatcher and there is no way how I could 
fix it as an upstream author. It is an inconsistency in the 
distribution, because switching to Pulse Audio output and not providing 
any means of audio output independent of gnome-session is simply broken 
and this is one of its consequences.

Your recomendation is to either turn off Pulse Audio (which is likely to 
break a lot of things since it is the default in Ubuntu Hardy) or for 
the user to do a lot of configuration and run it under the user session. 
But in the later case, how will the user make BrlTTY on text console or 
Speakup speak?

The system wide speech service must be available, but I see that it 
won't work (at least not without a lot of configuration) in Hardy now.
> The way I see things currently, given that my upload is allowed, is 
> this. The system is installed with gnome-speech. The user wishes to 
> switch to speech-dispatcher, so they install it. 
Wishes to switch? You seem to be speaking from the point of view of 
Orca, but what about BrlTTY, Speakup, speechd-el, Yasr? They can't work 
with gnome-speech.
> Then they can then go about configuring speech-dispatcher the way they 
> want.
Yes, but they should be allowed to start from a state of things that 
works, not from one which is broken.

>> Can't we at least change the configuration of the output modules from  
>> "alsa" to "pulse"
>>     
>> Yes, I could do that.
>>     
Great. But this is only meaningful if also:
>> and start a Pulse Audio daemon under the speech-dispatcher user from  
>> /etc/init.d/speech-dispatcher?
>>     
> No, we can not. PulseAudio will never run system wide, or even specifically 
> for another daemon user by default, particularly at this late stage. There is 
> just over a week
> till hardy is released, I'm pushing it as it is. 
>   

What do you mean by ,,will never run for another daemon user by 
default''? Is there any technical reason or is this your decision? 
Because that would fix it, it is obvious and it is necessary.

I understand this is a late release stage. But it is simply a serious 
issue and we have recently seen many people complaining, so I'm trying 
to discuss these things to propose a solution to fix that problem and I 
believe we should search for ways how to do it.

With regards,
Hynek Hanke