ALSA [Was: Paris summit]

[Lee Revell]

On Thu, 2006-06-22 at 09:08 +0200, Jeff Waugh wrote:
> <quote who="Lee Revell">
> 
> > Which is the vast majority of hardware these days.  By supporting OSS
> > and only OSS they are turning a blind eye to hardware reality.
> 
> What I'm trying to tell you is that, at the moment, they don't have much of
> an option. You can paint it as neglect on their part if you want, I would
> prefer to paint it as essentially neglect on *our* part.
> 

I'm sorry, I just don't buy it.  The entire open source world uses ALSA
- why can't the proprietary guys use it too?

Why haven't I seen any of these guys propose an alternative on the ALSA
lists?  They just wrote it off af first sight?

> > 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)
> 
> There are a lot of great reasons to use a good software mixing daemon
> instead of ALSA's dmix mess.
> 

How is it a mess?  What's wrong with it?  What reasons?

> > 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.
> 
> API/ABI stability of a complex, unnecessary, undesirable interface is no
> better - see my first reply about fixing it for actual solution suggestions.

Several proprietary apps do support ALSA, like Doom3.

You still haven't explained exactly what's wrong with ALSA on a
technical level.  All I've seen so far is "I don't like it".

Lee