Re: Activation of Speech Dispatcher under squeeze
I've looked at the bug report. I think the underlying problem is that upstream
Speech-Dispatcher is moving toward a model in which the daemon is run by the
user rather than system-wide.
What I don't understand is how this model is supposed to accommodate scenarios
such as the following.
1. BRLTTY (with speech support) loads early in the boot process.
Speech-dispatcher either has to be run as root or as a non-root system user
with access to the audio device, since nobody is logged in at that point.
If the user later starts an X session then we don't want a second
speech-dispatcher instance to be started, as this could then compete for the
audio device with the global instance - exactly what Speech-Dispatcher is
designed to prevent. Killing the global instance wouldn't work, since we still
need console sessions to be accessible when the X session is terminated or if
the user switches to a virtual console.
2. Same as above, but with Speakup as the assistive technology.
3. Gdm log-in, possibly in combination with any of the above scenarios.
Likewise for other X-based log-in tools that might become accessible at some
point.
4. Administrators who log in temporarily as root from a console session
instead of using su or sudo. (No, I'm not one of those except in
emergencies...)
I think Debian should coordinate this upstream, but in the absence of a
solution to the above issues I think running it as a system-wide daemon is the
only reasonable default, prefearbly as a non-root system user with suitable
permissions.
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