ALSA [Was: Paris summit]

[Lee Revell]

On Thu, 2006-06-22 at 03:12 +0200, Jeff Waugh wrote:
> <quote who="Lee Revell">
> 
> > But I also think OSS is a very rude choice because it blocks all other
> > apps from using the soundcard.
> 
> Only on hardware that doesn't support multi-write. Additionally, for most
> use cases, you can use a software mixing daemon (pulse, esd, jack - not
> dmix).
> 

Which is the vast majority of hardware these days.  By supporting OSS
and only OSS they are turning a blind eye to hardware reality.

It would not be as bad if these apps all had ESD support or whatever as
those systems can all run on top of ALSA+dmix (of course it's kind of
silly to run a software mixing daemon on top of ALSA's software mixer)

> > They are massively inconveniencing users because they can't be bothered to
> > grok ALSA.
> 
> It's not just that - they're not prepared to rely on ALSA. See my previous
> mail.
> 

What do you think it would take to get them to reconsider this position?
A commitment to a stable API/ABI from the ALSA developers?  I think
that's doable.

Lee