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On Fri, 2005-11-25 at 15:05 +0100, Spider (D.m.D. Lj.) wrote: |
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> On Fri, 2005-11-25 at 11:00 +0100, Michiel de Bruijne wrote: |
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> > On Friday 25 November 2005 10:24, Luca Barbato wrote: |
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> > > Michiel de Bruijne wrote: |
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> > > > Now that useflags are evaluated for the 2006.0 profile (e.g. nptl and |
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> > > > apache2) I wonder if it's still necessary to have oss in make.defaults? |
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> > > > The replacement (alsa) is preferred by kernel developers for almost 2 |
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> > > > years. Time to remove it from the 2006.0 profile? |
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|
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Never... going... to... happen... (don't worry, I'll explain) |
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|
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> > > I'd have a look at how many software are using oss only and how many |
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> > > have good alsa support, not to mention which drivers are oss only or |
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> > > work better as oss. |
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The software that primarily supports OSS only is my other area in |
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Gentoo... games. |
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|
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There's no way that we can make, for example, Return to Castle |
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Wolfenstein or Enemy Territory, both of which are extremely popular, use |
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ALSA natively. They *do* work with ALSA compiled with USE="oss" or with |
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alsa-oss installed. As far as I know, the oss USE flag on ALSA only |
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enables the alsa-oss dependency. |
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|
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> Theres a few issues here, at least Trident and via chipsets work good in |
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> alsa. however, due to the difficulty for programmers to use the |
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> alsa-api, you actually get -better- sound (less glitches and buffer |
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> underruns) if you use alsa-drivers + alsa-oss emulation. |
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> |
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> This is clearly visible in Fex. amarok (gstreamer backend) and other |
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> players, especially under higher system loads. (yes, even with a |
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> preemptive kernel) |
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> |
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> |
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> |
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> > For the programs that are oss-only a useflag shouldn't even exists, because |
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> > it's not optional. |
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|
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For those applications, correct. However, I have shown a good reason |
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for it. Unless we simply tell anyone to always merge alsa-oss if they |
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want to play games, which isn't exactly a "works out of the box" |
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solution. I can think of a few scenarios we could employ to work around |
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this, but they aren't nearly as clean as simply having OSS in the |
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default USE. Personally, I think it should stay until it is removed |
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from the kernel, and even then, it must stay so long as we are |
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supporting 2.4 kernels which do not have ALSA, such as vanilla-sources. |
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|
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> > All systems I maintain (about 15 different hardware/software specs) have -oss |
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> > and work as expected. I'm interested if someone on this list has |
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> > hardware/software where oss is preferred over alsa? |
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> > Does anybody knows if the default setup of other distros include |
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> > "oss-compiled" packages? |
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> |
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> Yeah, they do. At least last I checked both ubuntu and Fedora Core had |
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> oss as their default sound-sinks for many things. The transition period |
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> will take ages I'm afraid :/ |
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I would say a very long time, indeed. |
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-- |
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Chris Gianelloni |
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Release Engineering - Strategic Lead |
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x86 Architecture Team |
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Games - Developer |
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Gentoo Linux |