Subject: Re: [linux-audio-dev] Still I cannot understand why...
From: Paul Davis (pbd_AT_Op.Net)
Date: Tue Dec 18 2001 - 03:54:08 EET
> btw what is the reason for alsa to be constantly changing its API? I mean
>it's going on for years.
because we didn't get it right the first time around, suprise,
suprise. nor on the second. unlike OSS, ALSA has been able to grow and
improve as we've gained experience with new audio interfaces that
simply don't fit into an OSS-style model. it took a long time to work
out the details of the API. ALSA 0.5 has continued to be available
(takashi has even back ported some fixes to it, and regularly answers
questions about 0.5 on alsa-devel) while this other development was
going on. we could have stopped at ALSA 0.5, but the result would have
been an API that still wasn't really adequate. the API is 0.9 is not
perfect, but its amazingly good in many, many ways. getting to be that
good takes time. time to discover the design issues, the
implementation issues, the card-to-card issues, the bug-fixing
issues. but its getting there, to the point where almost all the work
on ALSA now is about fixing specific low level drivers and adding
polish to some of the "dumb user visible" parts of the system (both
things that i believe will continue for a long time, just as they have
with OSS).
--p
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