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

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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Received on Sat Jan 19 16:15:04 2008