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On Sat, 2005-11-26 at 09:32 +0100, Michiel de Bruijne wrote: |
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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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> All the systems I maintain have -oss and don't have alsa-oss installed (I do |
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> have activated OSS emulation in the kernel though). All the games I have |
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> installed on those systems (including RTCW and ET) work perfectly. That |
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> doesn't off course say that all Gentoo-based systems or all games work |
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> without problems, but I'm trying to say that the dependency on alsa might not |
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> be as necessary as you seem to think. |
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|
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Having OSS emulation in the kernel is the same as merging alsa-oss if |
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using alsa-driver. |
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|
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> > > > For the programs that are oss-only a useflag shouldn't even exists, |
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> > > > because 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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> Shouldn't 2.4 users use a 2.4 profile? (if they don't they have other |
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> "challenges" as well e.g. udev vs. devfs). oss turned on by default in a 2.4 |
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> profile makes perfect sense to me. |
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They do. The point being that I would prefer not diverge them |
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significantly except in locations where necessary. |
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|
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The real problem comes in with a game, such as enemy-territory, that |
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uses oss. If we remove oss from the default USE, we must have the game |
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check for either alsa-oss being installed, or check the kernel |
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configuration itself (yuck!). With it being a default, we can just |
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explain to the user that they need OSS support, as the default suggests. |
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|
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I really would not have a problem with removing oss from the default USE |
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if someone can come up with a clean way of making sure the support is |
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there on these older binary games. |
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|
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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 |