I think ALSA is a small problem with KDE on debian. In KDE 2.2 it was possible to choose different packages for ALSA support or not ALSA support, but that was removed in KDE 3 packaging. ARTS can be built without ALSA support, with ALSA 0.5 support or with ALSA 0.9 support. kdemultimedia does not build cleanly with ALSA 0.9, since support for it is simply missing. It only works with ALSA 0.5.
Some newer interesting audio applications require ALSA 0.9. But unfortunately, ALSA is not backward compatible, so if there is ALSA 0.9 in the kernel, ALSA 0.5 applications won't work. (Maybe some will) So what should KDE be built with? One version for all, with two versions ALSA and not ALSA, or with three versions, not ALSA, ALSA 0.5 and ALSA 0.9? I built KDE 3.1 beta with ALSA 0.9 support, but I am not sure that is good for everyone. You can also not cleanly rebuild kdemultimedia with ALSA 0.9 Is there maybe some policy, like "debian version XXX has ALSA X.Y as standard" or something like that? -- Karolina
