[LAD] alsa and OSS (again?)

Dave Phillips dlphillips at woh.rr.com
Sat Jan 19 12:54:25 UTC 2008


victor wrote:
>
> "Basically we got swindled. ALSA has not been the utopia that
> it was claimed to be. ALSA sucks. It's not even documented."
>  
> Hannu's text sometimes reads as propaganda.
Really ?!

I have all respect for Hannu and Dev, but I don't believe they've always 
held the community's interests above their own. I'm not even 
particularly slagging them for that (and they have given the community a 
lot to be thankful for), but I do think it's fair to say that ALSA came 
about precisely because of problems stemming from an apparent conflict 
of interest.

Hannu's text doesn't read so much as propaganda as sour grapes. I don't 
think ALSA's perfect, but it has a better track record of community 
support and it did address the shortfalls of the OSS spec. To be fair, 
OSS has continued its development and has tried to put on a better face 
towards the Linux audio community. I plan on reviewing it in the near 
future.

I think it's also fair to add that saying "ALSA sucks" is unlikely to 
endear him or his product to the existing community. But I don't think 
that's his goal now anyway. In fact, I'm kind of wondering what exactly 
he thinks we should all do.

As a user, it seems to me that ALSA has itself been minimized as a 
directly audio supported system, that JACK is the preferred audio 
control system now. Fine by me, so if OSS delivers low-latency and 
flawless performance as a JACK back-end, that's great. If not, I use 
another backend, right ? JACK rules. :)

The simple question for Hannu is: Given the existing applications base, 
can you effectively replace ALSA with something else without breaking 
*anything* ? And yes, I mean anything. If your product is truly 
superior, then an aspect of its true superiority would be an utter 
transparency, i.e. I'd install it and never ever have to consider it 
again. Plus, I'd never have to think of it when I compiled programs on 
my own (thanks to an extensive ALSA emulation layer, including the lib 
and headers, of course). And of course it would be low-latency safe, 
again without any intervention on my part. If the answers are "You 
betcha" across the board, then maybe it would be time to reconsider OSS. 
But I don't think many people really care about it (in the 
Linux-specific audio world).

Best,

dp




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