Speakup Issues

[William Hubbs]

On Fri, Mar 29, 2013 at 12:11:33PM -0600, William F. Acker WB2FLW +1-303-722-7209 wrote:
> Someone is probably going to launch an ICBM at my house for asking this 
> question, but, I wonder if we could ditch serial support. Maybe that could 
> be run in user space, and the rest could go into mainline. Do you know if 
> it's just the serial stuff they have a problem with?

Well, the serial code definitely has issues.

For those who don't know, the issue with speakup's serial code is that
we bypass the kernel's serial port drivers and write directly to the
hardware serial ports.

This is not good because we have to hard code the ports to write to into
the speakup code. Also it means that our code doesn't work with all
types of serial ports that the kernel supports.

In order to fix this, it would take working with the serial driver
maintainer in the kernel, at least, and a major rewrite of speakup's
serial code.

The fastest way to take care of this probably would be to write a daemon
which runs in user space. This daemon would act like espeakup, in the
sense that it would read the /dev/softsynth device, but it would send
output to  a serial (or even usb) device that the kernel knows about, e.g.
/dev/ttyS0.

I have been working on a usb device driver for the tripple talk for a while;
I should get back to finishing that.

The disadvantage of this of course is that hardware synthesizers then
would be subject to the same limitation as the software synthesizer; you
would have to wait until some point in the boot process when a daemon
could be started before speech would start. I think hardware speech
could start up pretty early; probably around the same time as brltty.

another issue right now is that when data is sent to the software
synthesizer, on an smp machine, data gets randomly dropped. If you
review the screen everything is there as it should be, but when the data
is initially sent to the synthesizer, parts of it do not get read.

This hasn't been fixed, because it is extremely difficult to debug and
reproduce.

Another question is that we still have drivers for old internal ISA
synthesizers, such as the doubletalk pc, dectalk pc, accent pc and
keynote pc. Are these being used? is it even possible to find a machine
any more that supports ISA slots?

William