Consider Updating Festival

[greg-hellings]

The version of Festival that we package is currently 1.9.6.

The last release (2014) was 2.4.0. We should consider updating the bundled package and testing that it still works OK.

[greg-hellings]

Looks like I'm wrong. 2.5 was released in 2017. http://festvox.org/festival/

[alerque]

Is there any possibility of unbundling it?

[greg-hellings]

I doubt it, but that's part of why I put this here. It depends on how the package looks and works. Fedora doesn't like to package end-user MinGW executables. Only libraries and - with a few very minor exceptions - some utilities here and there. One example is the gdb.exe that we package. I also was able to slip in the SWORD utils, because they are just part of the package and aren't the main target of the project.

If Festival can reasonably be passed off as a shared library, then it's possible. But if not, then we'll have to continue bundling it in.

[bgermann]

The xiphos Debian package does not include the bundled festival but recommends the festival Debian package. I tested it with version 2.5.0, so it should be fine to update or unbundle.