[LAD] alsa and OSS (again?)

[Albert Graef]

Fernando Lopez-Lezcano wrote:
> Or, if from the get go it would have been included in the mainline
> kernel source (after submitting it to the proper channels, etc, etc -
> difficult but not impossible. Out of mainline kernel drivers have always
> been a pain...).

True, but (1) as you mentioned, the barrier to entry is high, and (2)
even if it is accepted, who is going to maintain it? Researchers are
usually busy with other things, and are not delighted by the prospect to
go with each and every new kernel release just to update a single
driver. ;-)

Maybe it's possible to unbundle the MidiShare Linux driver from the main
sources. That alone would make it much easier to provide frequent
updates or patches for different kernel versions, and would provide a
path to get the driver into the kernel at some point. From my
experience, the rest of the MidiShare sources should compile on any
modern Linux distro without much ado. (Well, the old gtk apps included
with Midishare can be a headache since they require the gtk1 compat
libs, but this could be made a configure-time option.)

> I did wrestle with midishare a while back for Planet CCRMA (for
> openmusic, same as Dave) and I'm not looking forward to a rehash of
> that :-)

It would certainly be nice if PlanetCCRMA included Midishare again. :)
I'm currently getting a new laptop on which I can finally run
PlanetCCRMA alongside with SUSE again, so I'll probably look into that
when I have the time. It shouldn't be too difficult to adapt my patches
for FC8.

Albert

-- 
Dr. Albert Gr"af
Dept. of Music-Informatics, University of Mainz, Germany
Email:  Dr.Graef at t-online.de, ag at muwiinfa.geschichte.uni-mainz.de
WWW:    http://www.musikinformatik.uni-mainz.de/ag