How to package the smixer modules?

[Tanu Kaskinen <tanuk@iki.fi>]

Hi all!

What do the smixer modules do? I mean these files:

/usr/lib/alsa-lib/smixer/smixer-ac97.so
/usr/lib/alsa-lib/smixer/smixer-hda.so
/usr/lib/alsa-lib/smixer/smixer-sbase.so

Should they always be shipped along with the main libasound library? I
maintain the alsa-lib package in OpenEmbedded, and currently
OpenEmbedded has separate packages for libasound and the smixer
modules, and I wonder if that's a good idea. It looks like the smixer
modules don't get installed by default when libasound is installed.
Debian, in contrast, ships the smixer modules in the libasound package.

After studying the source code a bit, it seems that the smixer modules
are dynamically loaded by the "simple mixer" interface of libasound.
I'm not familiar with the purpose of that interface. I don't know if
there are many applications that use that interface, and I don't know
if those applications that do use it suffer badly if the smixer modules
aren't installed.

-- 
Tanu

https://www.patreon.com/tanuk