Bug 922543

The package is out of date because the previous maintainer was not very active with it. We have new maintainers for the package now and expect to keep it up to date.

Updating to 2.1 is kind of a big deal and has wider implications than just this package (it's used in Gnome for accessibility). We're past the feature deadline for F19, so I was thinking we'd update it for F20.

This bug appears to have been reported against 'rawhide' during the Fedora 20 development cycle.
Changing version to '20'.

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(In reply to Matthew Miller from comment #1)
> The package is out of date because the previous maintainer was not very
> active with it. We have new maintainers for the package now and expect to
> keep it up to date.
> 
> Updating to 2.1 is kind of a big deal and has wider implications than just
> this package (it's used in Gnome for accessibility). We're past the feature
> deadline for F19, so I was thinking we'd update it for F20.

It's now over *five* years since festival 2.1 came out. and F20 was EOL'ed almost 8 months ago.  What's the plan here?  Is it time to just 'rpm -e festival' and build it from source ourselves?

You could work on an updated package and either become a packager or do the work and have one of the packagers get it into Fedora.
I currently have less time to spend on Fedora and Festival is not high on my priority list and isn't likely to be any time soon. (Recently I have been spending a lot of Fedora time trying to figure out why i686 kernels aren't working in rawhide. But I also have update work to do on other packages that are more important to me and for which a lot less effort is needed to do the update.)

The Festival package in Fedora needs a lot of work to update to a newer release, fix a lot of bugs, and generally clean up the packaging. And, despite best intentions, we just haven't had the developer interest in doing so. 

The current plan is to retire Festival from Fedora. See thread at https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/devel@lists.fedoraproject.org/message/UOL4ETKKOFGTFZZ36V726OF7UTHYMEYP/ for discussion.

Despite being large, slow, and fragile, Festival is interesting software and as far as I know can produce the best quality results of any open-source TTS system. It would be nice if there is interest in continuing it, but that should probably be done from a clean slate in any case.

In the meantime, I think it's most honest to close the currently-open bugs as "WONTFIX". Thanks everyone for your reports and effort in making Fedora better.