sd_espeak segfaulting with alsa

[Klaus Knopper]

Dear list,

For almost a year, I'm experiencing random segfaults in
speech-dispatcher like this (dmesg):

sd_espeak[22010]: segfault at 8177000 ip b7d6e7cf sp b64fa010 error 4 in 
libc-2.8.so[b7cfb000+13a000]
sd_espeak[26990]: segfault at 80f6000 ip b7e877cf sp b660f010 error 4 in 
libc-2.8.so[b7e14000+13a000]

with speech-dispatcher (different versions) in the sd_espeak module,
which ONOY occurs when speech output is set to ALSA. OSS works fine and
stable, but I would like to use ALSA because of its mixing features
which would allow playing music and using a screenreder at the same
time.

speech-dispatcher in this case is driven by sbl (formerly SuSE Blind
Linux), but others have reported the same problem with other software
and suggested using OSS instead of ALSA, which would be my last resort,
other than fixing the problem with ALSA.

I have looked into the source and did not find any obvious place where
the segfault could happen, but occasionally, google finds reports that
the segfault appears within a memcpy() (which is not necessarily
happening within speech-dispatchers own sources).

I already tried upgrading and downgrading libc6, libaudio2, libespeak
and everything else, Debian etch or lenny, same result. Unfortunately,
there is no single reproducible action that triggers the bug, it just
happens randomly, sometimes after 5 Minutes, sometimes after several
hours of continuous various speech output.

speech-dispatcher keeps running after the segfault for some reason, but
does not produce audio output anymore. Therefore, it is not even
possible to automatically restart speech-dispatcher.

Do you have a hint for me where to look for the problem?

Regards
-Klaus