[LAD] alsa and OSS (again?)

[Fernando Lopez-Lezcano]

On Mon, 2008-01-21 at 07:32 +0100, Albert Graef wrote:
> 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, 

Yes, but it is the only way to make midishare "mainline". So that it
will always work with any vanilla distribution kernel (that has, of
course, enabled its build). 

The other option would be to implement all of midishare in user space. 

> and (2)
> even if it is accepted, who is going to maintain it? 

Well, the kernel maintainers of course. And whoever is maintaining it
now (sorry, I don't who that might be). I don't see what is the problem.
Assuming the kernel module is merged in (that might not be easy, of
course) then it will have to be kept up to date with the mainline kernel
but that is good. And probably not that much work, after all the
midishare kernel module is not evolving, right?

> 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. ;-)

They don't need to update the kernel. Why would they? The midishare
kernel module will keep working on the older kernels, right?

> 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. 

That would be a good first step. 

> 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. :)

The "kernel module problem" is still there. I do distribute my own
kernels (not that I like to do that :-) but some users use the normal
Fedora kernel. Then I would have to track the Fedora kernels and build
midishare modules for them as well. And right now Planet CCRMA does not
have any software that needs it (except maybe for Common Music but I
have been using portmidi for that - yuck...)

> 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.

-- Fernando