Re: alsa was Re: ABI coupling to hypervisors via CONFIG_PARAVIRT

[Zachary Amsden <zach@vmware.com>]

Pavel Machek wrote:

>> 	download & install alsalib
>> 	download & install alsautils
>> 	create 1007 nodes in /dev

I really hope you meant permission 1007 nodes, not 1007 nodes!  I'm 
checking right now, and if the latter is the case, I'm going to 
uninstall alsa, even if that means my computer will forever be silent, 
it will be silent in protest.

> (Just for the record, I should note that networking is misdesigned in
> similar way; that's why we have eth0 instead of /dev/eth0, and need
> special tools to rename network interface. But this mistake dates to
> BSD days or something, so we got used to it... and at least you do not
> need to keep libnetwork up to date to keep your  net devices working.
>
> So networking provides _ugly_ hardware abstraction, but it provides
> it).
>   

I might add it got only worse with wireless support, now you can not 
configure card without both ifconfig and iwconfig, so not only is the 
API diverging, the userspace tools to manage it are doing so as well.

Zach