[Pkg-italian-maintainers] Bug#375538: Error when trying to speak empty or blank strings

[Enrico Zini]

Package: festival-it
Severity: normal

Hello,

when trying to chase problems with using the Italian voices for
gnopernicus[1], I found out that empty or blank strings cause an error,
while it doesn't happen with the normal English voices:

$ festival
Festival Speech Synthesis System 1.4.3:release Jan 2003
Copyright (C) University of Edinburgh, 1996-2003. All rights reserved.
For details type `(festival_warranty)'
festival> (SayText "")
#<Utterance 0xa72d8cc8>
festival> (SayText " ")
#<Utterance 0xa72f0d08>
festival> (voice_lp_diphone)
lp_diphone
festival> (SayText "")
SIOD ERROR: wrong type of argument to get_c_val
festival> (SayText " ")
SIOD ERROR: wrong type of argument to get_c_val
festival>

I tried to have a look on how to change this behaviour, but I didn't
manage.  Maybe we need to ask upstream.

I'm not sure this is the cause of my gnopernicus problems: the errors
from the festival speech server should be ignored anyway.  However, such
a behavioral difference with the normal voices is something worth
noticing (and fixing).  The gnome-speech festival driver seems to really
like sending empty strings, for reasons totally unknown to me.

[1]
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-accessibility-list/2006-June/msg00014.html
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-accessibility-list/2006-June/msg00028.html
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-accessibility-devel/2006-June/thread.html
the last and more detailed report I sent hasn't reached the archive yet.
These mail refer to Dapper, but the example output I posted above has
been obtained with an updated sid.
-- System Information:
Debian Release: testing/unstable
  APT prefers unstable
  APT policy: (500, 'unstable')
Architecture: i386 (i686)
Shell:  /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash
Kernel: Linux 2.6.17-1-686
Locale: LANG=it_IT.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=it_IT.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)