Re: [PATCH 2/2] gnu: Add espeak.

[Ricardo Wurmus <ricardo.wurmus@mdc-berlin.de>]

Ludovic Courtès <ludo@gnu.org> writes:

> Leo Famulari <leo@famulari.name> skribis:
>
>> * gnu/packages/audio.scm (espeak): New variable.
>
> If you think eSpeak-ng is not ready yet, or is sufficiently different,
> it’s OK to package eSpeak.
>
>> +    (native-inputs
>> +     `(("unzip" ,unzip)))
>> +    (inputs
>> +      `(("sonic" ,sonic)
>
> The “unzip” line is misaligned.
>
>> +        ("pulseaudio" ,pulseaudio)
>> +        ("portaudio" ,portaudio)))
>
> Dunno if it’s useful to have both, maybe someone more knowledgeable like
> Ricardo can answer?

It *might* be useful for some people to have portaudio support, but we
don’t usually add all supported audio backends.  We don’t even always
add pulseaudio to the inputs, because pulseaudio can readily deal with
programmes that only use the ALSA backend.

I’m not using pulseaudio; for me it’s just ALSA for regular software +
JACK for “professional” audio where sync and timing matters.

I’m not very knowledgeable about pulseaudio, unfortunately.  As
pulseaudio can manage audio streams using various different backends
from pulseaudio-agnostic software, what really is to be gained by adding
pulseaudio to the inputs?  AFAIK using pulseaudio directly is not much
different from using ALSA and configuring pulseaudio to manage this
stream.

~~ Ricardo