tweaking the LiveCD

[Matthew Miller]

On Tue, Feb 20, 2007 at 06:16:35PM -0500, Jeremy Katz wrote:
> > orca too, probably even more important (not sure whether it was removed
> > for FC7t1 cuz it drags in festival which is huge). 
> Yeah, the space requirement of festival makes it (and the things which
> depend on it, including gok) a lot less attractive.  :-/   Not sure what
> to do on that front

Festival could by split up so some or all of the voices are in a subpackage.

I'm not hugely versed in the technical details, but the CMU ARCTIC HTS
voices sound great to me (better than the only free alternatives, the older
and much larger kal_diphone and ked_diphone ones). We could probably get
away with just including the CMU ARCTIC SLT voice (female US English
speaker), which is the smallest at 1756k. That alone would save us half the
size of the package.

Plus, the speech-tools binaries (in libexec) probably aren't needed by
almost everyone. And that's pretty significant.

*And*, there's some stuff packaged up under /usr/share/festival/dicts that I
think maybe doesn't need to be. For example, there's a 118K *patch* in
there, plus the 3.6M file that's getting patched. (cmudict-0.4.diff and
cmudict-0.4.scm). I assume that's done to fulfill the "Any modifications
must be clearly marked as such" clause in the license for the data files in
that directory -- probably that could be done in a somewhat smaller way.

Oh, and some stuff in /usr/share/festival/etc which is "etc" in the "misc
et cetera crap" sense, not the "config files" sense.

So, doing all of that would bring the package down to 16M from 54M (on
x86_64).

Someone who knew the package better and/or had more than a minimal working
knowledge of Lisp could probably pare down and/or subpackage non-core
functionality even further -- I bet the minimal-but-useful set is under 10M.

-- 
Matthew Miller           mattdm at mattdm.org          <http://mattdm.org/>
Boston University Linux      ------>              <http://linux.bu.edu/>