On Tue, 20 Jan 2004, Don Levey wrote: > Yeah, it was all free - and I'm not asking for my money back. The question > I continually have is "what is the long-term goal of Linux and the > open-source community?" Is it a hobbyist OS? Is it something which is
The open-source community doesn't really have common long-term goals. The community consist of individuals (developers, users, packagers), companies (distros, desktop use, embedded use, workstations, etc), developer groups, etc, etc, all with potentially different short and long term goals, motives, etc. For me, I want to do music with pro-gear on Linux and like to have source code access to all sw I'm using (so I don't have to rely on certain companies staying in business to keep on working using the methods I use today). Linux and ALSA have delivered this to me ever since 1999. Sure I have had to write some code, and also I've had to throw away some hardware I've bought which I couldn't get to work on Linux, but it's a small price to pay for the setup I have now. So my long-term goal is to support (and enhance) those areas of Linux audio that I use and rely on. Also, I am very careful when buying new hardware, and only support companies that support Linux. This is really the only long-term-proof way of making sure modern hardware will continue work on Linux. > When I see a 1.0.x version number, I expect there to be bugs and problems. > But I expect things to work properly most of the time. It's in the 2.6 > kernel? That tells me, perhaps falsely, that this is ready for broad-based ALSA does work very well and has done so for a long time! Most of the problems people have been complaining about in this (and related) threads, have been about specific cards. There will be _never_ be a moment where ALSA has perfect support for all cards, as new hardware is released all the time! So postponing the 1.0.x release for this reason would have been absurd! In areas that are not driver/soundcard-specific, ALSA is systematically better than OSS, so deserves to be default in 2.6.x systems, and its 1.0.x version number. > Am I asking for the ALSA developers to obtain and test every sound boadr on > the market, every chipset? Not at all. I wouldn't mind some sort of clear > chart, as has been suggested, specifying just WHAT is *fully* > supported/tested. Another section, "should work", would be nice, as well as [...] > a "don't hold your breath" section. This should be a reasonable request - > the developers should know against which hardware they test, what passes and > what fails. The middle section, the best-guess list, would probably be the This sounds easy, but thouroughly testing one card is a big task and is very difficult to automate (you need to test multiple apps, dmix/dsnoop, record+capture, sync-issues, etc, etc). Basicly you'd need to re-run the tests after each big change in the sourcebase to be able to strongly recommend a card. Now consider that there are thousands of cards (calculating all hw-revisions of one specific card type) supported. The ALSA developers (2-3 full-time developers atm) don't really have the time to do any of this. I'd rather see them working on the code and leave the testing to us users. > I'm sure some people will tell me to stop whining, what do I want for free. > That's OK - but I'd ask in return what they're doing this for. I'm trying Well, hopefully I answered that! :) -- http://www.eca.cx Audio software for Linux! ------------------------------------------------------- The SF.Net email is sponsored by EclipseCon 2004 Premiere Conference on Open Tools Development and Integration See the breadth of Eclipse activity. February 3-5 in Anaheim, CA. http://www.eclipsecon.org/osdn _______________________________________________ Alsa-user mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/alsa-user
