Re: Is it time for remove (crap) ALSA from kernel tree ?

Adrian Bunk
2007-06-28T21:06:00Z

On Thu, Jun 28, 2007 at 07:30:36PM +0100, Nix wrote:
> On 25 Jun 2007, Adrian Bunk stated:
> > If people often run into this problem it might make sense to deprecate
> > the in-kernel OSS emulation and point people to the userspace emulation
> > instead?
>
> So now people need to know internal implementation details like if a
> program uses ALSA or OSS interfaces before they know how to *run* it?
>
> That doesn't sound especially nice to use (and before you say
> `distributors will do it', not all programs are built by distributors).

The interesting point is that what you call "internal implementation
details" is much _more_ exposed with the OSS emulation in the kernel
_enabled_.

Why?

Linux software not supporting ALSA has becoming quite esoteric.

But software like mplayer supporting both and trying OSS first and
software supporting both and letting the user choose is today much more
common. And that's exactly the case where users run into the results of
the "internal implementation detail" that their application used the
in-kernel OSS emulation instead of ALSA resulting in exactly these
problems.

There is also a userspace OSS emulation for ALSA not suffering from
these problems.

It's not my decision whether or not to remove the in-kernel OSS emulation,
all I'm saying is that removing it might actually result in less users
having problems.

cu
Adrian

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