2003-May-06

pkgsrc freezes are done at various times. This is done to make sure that the pkgsrc is really in sync. It would be helpful for part-time users of pkgsrc to be able to updated their pkgsrc collection to the date of end of freeze. Send-pr: pkg/21480: please report when a pkgsrc freeze is done. (agc closed on 29/May/2003; he said: "I'll ... inform users when freezes start and end."

Learning about ctags. less and vi can use a tags file which is created with ctags command. NetBSD comes with a default.

$ less -T /var/db/libc.tags -t strsignal
/autobuild/src/lib/libc/string/strsignal.c: No such file or directory

The libc.tags supplied in the set had "/autobuild" hard-coded in it. (This should probably default to "/usr" instead. **maybe send-pr this.) But with my 1.6.1 libc.tags that I built, it worked fine. It showed the strsignal() function. Interesting. An article about this is at http://www.daemonnews.org/199810/cbsdrun.html.

Send-pr: misc/21491: please start a chat mailing list.

Imported portmap to wip-pkgsrc. And also uploaded net-tools, sysvinit, and sysklogd (for Linux) to wip-pkgsrc.

Installed festival for speech synthesis. For a voice, I installed festvox-tll-2.0 (American English female voice). To make it work, I created an ~/.festivalrc file with:

(set! voice_default 'voice_tll_diphone)
(Parameter.set 'Audio_Method 'sunaudio)

Using default NAS for audio worked too. I did this on an old and slow Pentium 166. It was slow to speak. This was very quiet. I read about raising the volume, but I need to figure it out.

Festival includes several scripts, for example you can run: "/usr/pkg/share/festival/examples/saytime" to get it to speak the time. You can also run festival interactively. It can speak like:

(SayText "hello")