Accepted alsa-utils 1.0.9a-4ubuntu1 (source)

[Matt Zimmerman]

On Fri, Jul 29, 2005 at 09:57:58PM +0200, Thomas Hood wrote:
> alsaconf now writes /etc/mod(utils|probe.d)/sound.  (The file name
> was chosen before I got involved.  I think that 'alsaconf' would
> have been better, but it doesn't matter much.)  So it doesn't
> break the module loader any more.  :)

Oh, good news then.

> At one time alsaconf was important because it wrote the one and
> only module loader configuration file for ALSA.  Now most of the
> useful stuff has been put into /etc/mod(utils|probe.d)/alsa-base
> which is a conffile of alsa-base.  alsaconf only writes two lines
> like the following to /etc/mod(utils|probe.d)/sound:
> 
>     alias snd-card-0 $CARD_DRIVER
>     options $CARD_DRIVER index=0 $CARD_OPTS
> 
> These lines can't be moved to /etc/mod(utils|probe.d)/alsa-base
> because they depend on the card driver that alsaconf detects.

alsaconf was also important in the past because there was no other
straightforward way to select the default sound card, but now we have a
solution for that as well.

> The down side of retaining alsaconf, aside from the fact that
> it requires a lot of patching, is that its presence abets the
> misapprehension many users have that they _need_ to run alsaconf
> in order to "set up" their soundcard.

Indeed.  I think that this outweighs its benefit as a diagnostic tool, since
(as we have seen in Ubuntu), users for whom sound doesn't "just work" will
find documentation telling them to run alsaconf, find a workaround and not
report a bug when they should.

> Eventually I will succumb to the urge to eliminate alsaconf
> from Debian alsa-utils and then the last remaining difference
> between the Debian and the Ubuntu packages can go away.  :)

Looking forward to that day. ;-)

-- 
 - mdz