Package: festival Version: 1:2.5.0-13 Severity: normal https://wiki.debian.org/Festival
The wiki documents it's use for writing a wav file to disk, there are many potential uses for it that don't involve local sound output such as sending audio from a web server for example. I think a recommends is a reasonable option here. The default /etc/festival.scm uses "aplay" from alsa-utils to play audio, that can easily be configured to use "paplay" from pulseaudio-utils or "pw-play" from pipewire-bin so depending on alsa-utils | pulseaudio-utils | pipewire-bin would also be a reasonable option. The counter argument to this would be "pulseaudio and pipewire both provide an ALSA interface so an ALSA program can talk to all three". But I think that as both KDE and GNOME depend on pipewire-bin the vast majority of systems will have a more recent sound system installed and not wanting to have alsa utilities installed is quite reasonable. Even going a single step up and depending on pulseaudio-utils would be a step up. In Testing the only packages that depend on alsa-utils are festival and reform-desktop. -- System Information: Debian Release: forky/sid Architecture: amd64 (x86_64) Foreign Architectures: i386 Kernel: Linux 7.0.12+deb14.1-amd64 (SMP w/18 CPU threads; PREEMPT) Kernel taint flags: TAINT_CPU_OUT_OF_SPEC, TAINT_WARN Locale: LANG=en_AU, LC_CTYPE=en_AU (charmap=ISO-8859-1), LANGUAGE not set Shell: /bin/sh linked to /usr/bin/dash Init: unable to detect Versions of packages festival depends on: ii adduser 3.157 ii alsa-utils 1.2.15.2-3 ii libc6 2.42-17 ii libestools2.5 1:2.5.0-14+b2 ii libgcc-s1 16.1.0-2 ii libstdc++6 16.1.0-2 ii libsystemd0 261-1 ii sgml-base 1.31+nmu1 Versions of packages festival recommends: pn festvox-kallpc16k | festival-voice <none> Versions of packages festival suggests: pn festival-freebsoft-utils <none> pn pidgin-festival <none> -- debconf-show failed
