On Wed, Jul 04, 2007 at 02:35:39AM -0400, Darren wrote:
I know this may sound kind of stupid, but how about not deprecating either,
and fully supporting both sound systems? Maybe we can get them to work
together, and the distro or user can choose whether they would like to use
alsa or oss for that particular card (or have the distro choose the sound
drivers that are best supported for that particular card). As it is now,
most apps already support oss and alsa.
It does not sound stupid and sounds good at first sight.
But there are problems we've already seen with similar situations in
different parts of the kernel:
They would have different hardware support, features and bugs.
And then a user user whose sound card is only supported by sound system A
needs a feature only available in sound system B.
And the quality decreases since people will often not report bugs in
sound system A if sound system B works for them.
OTOH, for a user it shouldn't matter whether there's OSS or ALSA, that's
mostly a difference for application developers. And since (as you say)
most applications already support both, there's no compelling reason for
providing more than one of them.
From Hannu message:"I think the ideal solution would be that both ALSA and OSS APIs can co-exist by sharing the same low level drivers (which has