Re: [LAD] ALSA doumentation

On Thursday 13 November 2008 07:08:19 pm Fons Adriaensen wrote: I feel your pain, Fons. I myself have been looking for such a thing for 6+ years, wholly unsuccessfully. I think that this single issue is the major reason for the continued survival and, indeed, thriving of the old OSS API. For all it's shortcomings, it does provide a reliable, relatively compact and, above all, well-documented path to getting sound into and out of a Linux box. ALSA OTOH seems to me to be designed to be *anti*-compact, and when added to the dearth of usable documentation makes for an all-but-unusable system. Yes, it has always struck me as odd how the ALSA Project trumpets it's 'Advanced' nature in the title, while providing no coherent explanation anywhere as to how or why it merits that title. Even a page or two of *philosophy* -- the design goals, the guiding principles of the design -- would be worth more than the totality of all the useless recitations of the obvious in the Doxygen docs. Cheers! |-------------------------------------------------------------------------| | Frederick F. Gleason, Jr. | Chief Developer | | | Paravel Systems | |-------------------------------------------------------------------------| | ... But if we laugh with derision, we will never understand. Human | | intellectual capacity has not altered for thousands of years so far as | | we can tell. If intelligent people invested intense energy in issues | | that now seem foolish to us, then the failure lies in our understanding | | of their world, not in their distorted perceptions. Even the standard | | example of ancient nonsense -- the debate about angels on pinheads -- | | makes sense once you realize that theologians were not discussing | | whether five or eighteen would fit, but whether a pin could house a | | finite or an infinite number. | | -- S. J. Gould, "Wide Hats and Narrow Minds" | |-------------------------------------------------------------------------|