Re: [LAD] alsa and OSS (again?)

victor wrote: 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