[orca-list] orca, x86_64, espeechfactory and speech-dispatcher

[Peter Rayner <prayner unimelb edu au>]

I'm currently upgrading from Fedora 13 to 16. I need to use an x86_64
instalation. My main user interface is emacspeak and I use the voxin
(aka ibmtts, outloud ...) speech server. I don't want to change that
for emacspeak although I will if someone can suggest a compelling
alternative that can do French and English. Installing this 32-bit
system on an x86_64 machine isn't trivial but is working. On my FC-13
machine I'm using espeechfactory and orca and emacspeak play happily
together. On the FC-16 machine emacspeak is working but orca is
proving more challenging. With the deprecation of espeechfactory I
planned to move to speech-dispatcher using the sd_ibmtts module.
sd_ibmtts doesn't seem to be distributed in the FC-16 distribution of
speech-dispatcher, ither the x86_64 or i686 versions. Ok, I can
probably compile that. 
Using espeechfactory
as a stopgap isn't an option since the release of orca shipped with
fc-16 (3.2.1) already seems to have speech methods not defined in
espeechfactory (at least that's how I interpret 
a traceback containing:
  File "/usr/lib64/python2.7/site-packages/orca/speech.py", line 354, in updatePunctuationLevel
    _speechserver.updatePunctuationLevel()
AttributeError: 'SpeechServer' object has no attribute 'updatePunctuationLevel')

Ok, so far this is a speech-dispatcher question. My curiosity concern
is that orca is listed in the fc distribution as an x86_64 package
depending on speech-dispatcher x86_64. Is this just a mislabelling in
the distribution or are there really architectural dependencies in the
orca code?  Will I be able to run this stock system with the x86_64
versions of orca and speech-dispatcher with the i686 version of
sd_ibmtts (probably compiled by me) linking in  libibmeci?  If that's
not viable, has anyone else found a combination on an x86_64 system
that allows emacspeak and orca to play together but doesn't use
espeechfactory?
Boy I love upgrading :-)
cheers
Peter




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Peter Rayner
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