[orca-list] OT, espeak has been forked

[kendell clark <coffeekingms gmail com>]

hi all
As some of you may or may not know, about a week or two ago, espeak was 
forked into a new project, called espeak-ng, for next generation. Reece 
dunn, the developer of espeak for android, has done this primarily 
because multiple people have tried reaching jonathan duddington, the 
main developer and have  failed. Some have gone so far as to get his 
address in the UK, and his phone number, both of which no longer work. 
The conclusion is either that he is dead or no longer active, so espeak 
was forked. I'm writing this mainly because it looks like the upstream 
espeak from which espeak ng was forked from might not see much 
development. There have already been a ton of changes done to espeak ng 
that aren't in espeak, including the complete removal of espeak edit, 
the gui program needed to compile the phoneme data. This has been murged 
into the espeak program itself, so you can now do espeak 
--compile-phonemes and espeak --compile-intonations instead of having to 
use a clunky gui that has never been accessible on linux. A QT gui is 
planned that will make it easier to manage this stuff but it hasn't been 
written. I'm also wondering if  we should switch over to this fork? And 
by we I mean all the major linux distributions. Ubuntu, vinux, sonar, 
arch, fedora, etc? I've already got reece dunn merging my fixes into 
espeak periodically, just like he does with the italian fixes, and jamie 
and mic from nvda have already switched over or are planning to.
Espeak ng should work out of the box with speech-dispatcher as far as I 
know. I've not successfully built it yet, because it's still wildly in a 
state of flux, but it should work. We might need to modify the espeak 
speech-dispatcher module but I doubt it. Honestly that module needs an 
overhall anyway, but it isn't necessary I don't believe, since the 
espeak API hasn't changed much, only been added to to allow the 
compilation of phonemes and intonation data. The only thing that might, 
maybe, be necessary is a tweak to say espeak (next generation) or 
something to differentiate it from espeak. The main differences between 
espeak and espeak ng are probably not of much interest to most people, 
other than that you can now do the standard ./configure, make, make 
install steps to compile it, which the upstream espeak couldn't do.
THoughts?

Kendell clark