running speech-dispatcher-0.7.1 in system mode

[Steve Holmes]

On Mon, Oct 11, 2010 at 11:15:50AM +0200, Milan Zamazal wrote:
> Those distributions can simply change the default configuration values.

I know it's not a matter of votes but I would really be curious as to
how many distros actually use Pulse vs those that do not.  Arch,
Slackware, and Debien apparently don't but Ubuntu does.  Vinux, a
Ubuntu, I think bypasses pulse or I thought it did.  I know Pulse was
nothing but trouble for that distro when it came out.  It just sounds
like pulse audio is more trouble than it's worth, given the
developers' apparent lack of concern for a11y issues.

Anyway, back to the subject; could we have the disable_autospawn
feature set up as a command line option? Presently, one has to modify
the configuration file to uncomment that lline.  I think just about
everything else can be overridden via command line options.  Oh, I
don't recall if autio output method can be specified from the command
line or not.  My goal here as an Arch packager was to be able to
install the config files pretty much as they were from the source but
for system wide use, override with command line options in a central
startup script.  This way, a user could choose to use that script and
run as a system wide service or leave it off and just run it locally
from a normal user and use the default config files and autospawn the
thing.  I figure we could have it both ways with minimal fiddling
around with config files on the part of the user.

My experience generally with speech dispatcher, ever since the
beginning, has been my having to go through the entire speechd.conf
and make customizations personally before I could use it.  If a user
installs from a distro's package, she should not have to mess with
files just to get it basically working.