Arch Linux User Repository

The issue mentioned by @mutlu_inek and @manni affects this and other localised piper-voices packages. The proper way to fix this is to change the following line from:

 git lfs install

to:

 git lfs install --local

The default behaviour of git lfs install is to setup the LFS filters inside the global .gitconfig file. Adding --local makes it modify (or create) a .gitignore file inside the current repository, which in this case is the local copy of the piper-voices repo from huggingface.co, so it doesn't conflict with any constraints enforced by makepkg.

@mutlu_inek: I have run into the same problem, I guess it is a behaviour change form git-lfs. It chokes at the command "git lfs install" in prepare step, because somehow that wants to write the global .gitconfig[1], which arch's makepkg prevents by setting the environment variable "GIT_CONFIG_GLOBAL" to "/dev/null".

As a workaround I did:

  # convert specific lfs pointers into actual models
+ unset GIT_CONFIG_GLOBAL
  git lfs install

Best would be to rewrite the PKGBUILD to avoid git-lfs usage, eg. fetch from http directly if that is possible.

[1] it seems to add the following lines to ~/.gitconfig:

[filter "lfs"]
    process = git-lfs filter-process
    required = true
    clean = git-lfs clean -- %f
    smudge = git-lfs smudge -- %f

It doesn't compile. I get the error "error: could not lock config file /dev/null: Permission denied'". Seems like git needs more than user permissions?

Anyone else running into this?

Licenses: MIT

Turns out it's a mess.

Like the repo is tagged as MIT but it seems most voices are in CC license.

And some are in CC BY-NC-SA which is not libre: https://huggingface.co/rhasspy/piper-voices/blob/main/en/en_US/ryan/low/MODEL_CARD

Even worse, there is a straight all right reserved one: https://huggingface.co/rhasspy/piper-voices/blob/main/en/en_GB/alan/low/MODEL_CARD https://github.com/MycroftAI/mimic3-voices/blob/master/voices/en_UK/apope_low/LICENSE

So without even considering the issue of without training data, there is not really a source code, the license of part of the models binaries is not libre and it might not even be redistributable.

Thank you, fixed!

/usr/share/piper-voices/**/*.onnx files are all ASCII files of the form:

⟩ cat /usr/share/piper-voices/en/en_GB/alan/low/en_GB-alan-low.onnx
version https://git-lfs.github.com/spec/v1
oid sha256:a1f60584620a2bed203de823d08f5abb336fb15f3d6f33f8c341e3e2cabf5dde
size 63104526

Files are not the Protobuf binary data expected, but some git-lfs metadata. True for piper-voices-en-gb as well. Reason is found during prepare():

Skipping object checkout, Git LFS is not installed for this repository.
Consider installing it with 'git lfs install'.

I looked in git-lfs changelog but couldn't find anything relevant. This oneliner fixes it.

diff --git a/PKGBUILD b/PKGBUILD
index 5febe41..71692f8 100644
--- a/PKGBUILD
+++ b/PKGBUILD
@@ -37,6 +37,7 @@ prepare(){
  printf '%s\n' ${_models[*]}

  # convert specific lfs pointers into actual models
+ git lfs install
  git lfs pull --include $(IFS=,; echo "${_models[*]}")
 }