Re: Using festival in Orca

Carles Pina i Estany <[email protected]> Fri, 2 Jan 2026 08:00:10 +0100
Newsgroups	gmane.linux.debian.devel.accessibility
Message-ID	<[email protected]>
Hi,

On 31 Dec 2025 at 09:59:32, Samuel Thibault wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> Carles Pina i Estany, le mer. 31 déc. 2025 07:28:33 +0100, a ecrit:
> > I'd like to avoid having to run "festival --server". I thought of
> > setting up a systemd user unit to try to run automatically for the user.
> > 
> > Is there another better / recommended way?
> 
> That'd probably be the right way nowadays, yes, with socket activation
> ideally.

I've documented it in the Wiki without socket activation:

https://wiki.debian.org/Orca#Voices_using_festival_speech_synthesizer

I will improve it (at least some formatting for example) next days.

> > I plan to document the steps in, at least:
> 
> We'd rather integrate it into the package, so people don't have anything
> to do but install the speech-dispatcher-festival package.

I've tried to write the systemd units for socket activation for the Wiki
documentation and that would be re-usable to add them in the
speech-dispatcher-festival and I found some "blockers" (blockers for me,
might be possible though and happy to try again).

I haven't written socket activation services before but I found out:
I think that the application (festival in that case) should be able to
reuse an already opened socket? (systemctl binds 1314 and passes the
file descriptor to it?).

But festival --server has only a "bind" in a port, so it makes all the
socket activation harder.

Then I thought that systemd could bind 1314 port, proxy to a second port
(1315). And systemd could spawn "festival --server" indicating 1315.
This almost worked and I could make it work... but I thought that would
not be usable for speech-dispatcher-festival package because we want
each "festival --server" running using the active user, so in a
multi-user system that would cause problems. Is it correct that we want
each user to have their own "festival --server" or one as
"festival-server" user would be enough for the system?

For the Wiki documentation: since a user choose to enable the festival
--server because the user is happy with it: I thought that keeping it
simple is better than using socket activation. But I could change it.

What do you think?

Cheers,

-- 
Carles Pina i Estany
https://carles.pina.cat | [email protected] | [email protected]
signature.asc (application/pgp-signature, 833 B)