Where is the real developers list?

Where is the real developers list?

[Carlo Wood]

I only see questions on this list,
and nobody who answers them.

Where are the developers?  Is ALSA still maintained?

-- 
Carlo Wood <carlo@alinoe.com>


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Re: Where is the real developers list?

[Kai Vehmanen]

Hi,

On Thu, 10 Jul 2003, Carlo Wood wrote:

> I only see questions on this list,
> and nobody who answers them.
[...]
> Where are the developers?  Is ALSA still maintained?

ALSA is definitely maintained, and alsa-devel is the correct list. ALSA
actually has quite a good history in project activity. Development has
continued without breaks for over five years now and it certainly hasn't
slowed down recently. I've been developing ALSA applications since 1999, 
and well, I'm still here! :)

But for the last few years the users/developers ratio has simply gone
through the roof, and nowadays the developers are simply overwhelmed with
different kinds of requests/reports (both from users and application
developers). I cannot speak for them, but I'd guess they simply have to
ignore some of the issues (even good, valid reports), or otherwise they
wouldn't have time for the actual development work. I guess the state of
OSS audio in current kernels is one reason for the massive interest in
ALSA.

Unfortunately there hasn't been a similar flood of developers to ALSA.  
Hopefully now that ALSA is in linux-2.5.xx this situation will slowly
change.

As with other busy FOSS projects (Linux kernel, Apache), you have to be
patient to get developer attention. For example, writing a small test
program that demonstrates the problem is a good way to make
debugging/fixing easier for the developers (and increases the likelihood
that they will look at your issue). But I guess - if you are the same guy
who has been writing to the linux-c++ list - you already know this. ;)

-- 
 http://www.eca.cx
 Audio software for Linux!



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Re: Where is the real developers list?

[Carlo Wood]

Hi Kai,

thanks for the extensive answer.

Maybe I am a little impatient, thats true.  Sorry about that.

However, I am not really doing this formyself, but for
many other people who now are relying on.

The problem is to get an old, unmaintained and closed
software application working: IBM's ViaVoice.  This is
the ONLY speech recognition software that works reasonable
for linux.  Other people are working on writing open source
speech recognition software, but that is not a trivial
things and in the mean time many people need this ViaVoice
thing to work.

ViaVoice assume the OSS interface - and I need it work with
ALSA.  That SHOULD not be a problem because ALSA supports
OSS - but in practise: it doesn't work.

I believe that this is a bug in ALSA, or at least in the
portion that support/emulates OSS.

I cannot change ViaVoice because it is closed software.
I cannot write to IBM and request help: they don't support
this anymore.

What is left is to figure out why ALSA fails to emulate
OSS in this particular case.

I wrote a simple test case that reproduces the exact
problem (at least, on my PC, with a Create SB Live! Value).
See a previous mail of me with the Subject
"Bug in OSS simulation (ALSA 0.9.4)"

To my suprise I saw on the webpage of alsa that I'd need
0.9.4 as the version that supports OSS.  Does this mean
that 0.9.5 does NOT support OSS at all anymore ?!?

-- 
Carlo Wood <carlo@alinoe.com>


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Re: Where is the real developers list?

[Kai Vehmanen]

On Fri, 11 Jul 2003, Carlo Wood wrote:

> ViaVoice assume the OSS interface - and I need it work with
> ALSA.  That SHOULD not be a problem because ALSA supports
> OSS - but in practise: it doesn't work.

ALSA's OSS emulation is very good, but not perfect. There are quite a few 
apps that use the OSS API in strange ways and it's difficult to support 
all variations (search the ALSA mailing archives for Quake for example). 

> I believe that this is a bug in ALSA, or at least in the
> portion that support/emulates OSS.
[...]
> I cannot change ViaVoice because it is closed software.
> I cannot write to IBM and request help: they don't support
> this anymore.

Yup, I guess if the ALSA developers are at LinuxTag, you'll have to wait a
while before they can give the definitive answer.

> I wrote a simple test case that reproduces the exact
> problem (at least, on my PC, with a Create SB Live! Value).
> See a previous mail of me with the Subject
> "Bug in OSS simulation (ALSA 0.9.4)"

Sorry about that, you had indeed already posted the test case. I'll
comment on the test case in a separate mail.

> To my suprise I saw on the webpage of alsa that I'd need
> 0.9.4 as the version that supports OSS.  Does this mean
> that 0.9.5 does NOT support OSS at all anymore ?!?

Nope, it still does. Emulating OSS is an important feature for ALSA as it
is needed for ALSA to replace the OSS drivers in the Linux kernel.

-- 
 http://www.eca.cx
 Audio software for Linux!



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Re: Where is the real developers list?

[Clemens Ladisch]

Carlo Wood wrote:
> Where are the developers?

I guess both are at the LinuxTag <http://www.linuxtag.org/>.


Regards
Clemens





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