Latest revision as of 19:03, 1 December 2015

Festival TTS update to 2.4

Summary

The Festival text-to-speech package in Fedora hasn't been meaningfully updated since 2007. It's languishing at version 1.96, and the current release (as of December of last year, 2014) is 2.4. Plus, the specfile itself is kind of... state of the art for 2005, or maybe worse. This change will update the version and revamp the packaging completely.

Owner

Name: Matthew Miller
Release notes owner:

Current status

Targeted release: Fedora 24
Last updated: 2015-12-01
Tracker bug: <will be assigned by the Wrangler>

Detailed Description

The Festival package is out of date. That should be fixed. It's also a mess of many sources and patches. This will be redone in an effort to simplify everything, and to better match upstream (where, for example, "speech_tools" is a source separate package, and where many voices come from entirely different sources.) There are many bugs related to the packaging which can be resolved. We can also take advantage of weak dependencies.

Benefit to Fedora

A. Festival won't be so out of date, giving better text to speech capabilities.

B. The packaging will be less awful.

Scope

Proposal owners: New packaging.
Other developers: Not a system-wide change, but help would be good for package review.
Release engineering: N/A (not a System Wide Change)
- List of deliverables: N/A (not a System Wide Change)
Policies and guidelines: N/A (not a System Wide Change)
Trademark approval: N/A (not needed for this Change)

Upgrade/compatibility impact

The package will upgrade cleanly, and users (and packages) which just call the festival binary will work seamlessly. Anyone using the libraries or tools may need to adjust as packaging may change (this is generally to fix bugs in the old approach). Upstream claims backwards compatibility to previous releases.