Re: [gentoo-dev] New ALSA maintainers

[Josh Saddler]

Jakub Moc wrote:
> Uhm... Sorry to see this issue brought up yet again. Just a couple of
> brief notes:
>
> - The in-kernel drivers seriously are not an equivalent alternative, let
> alone the preferred one, for stuff like hda-intel or any similar drivers
> that are under permanent heavy development, at least for now.
>
> - This is not a duplicated maintenance effort, it's simply needed to
> have external alsa-drivers ebuilds, and it's needed to have them
> supported as ALSA upstream won't accept bugs about in-kernel drivers.
>
> - The two are basically different branches, and it's *not* about whether
> the code is newer or older in one or the other at all.


I completely disagree with your assessment of the in-kernel hda-intel
state. My workstation uses one of those (labelled nVidia MCP 55, for the
curious), and my experiences with in-kernel ALSA have been nothing but
positive with the intel audio, whether compiled or as modules.

For the record, the kernel and alsa team have gone back and forth on
this for a long time -- and it's always been my task to update the ALSA
guide for whichever "wins", or at least that's how it's been lately. The
thing about ALSA upstream not accepting certain bugs -- I'm not sure
Diego ever mentioned any such thing; is this really true?

At the very least, this should cut down on spurious bug reports on our
own bugzilla. However, it'd be nice from the point of view of the GDP if
the kernel and ALSA maintainers would decide, once and for all, what
should be supported and what shouldn't, whether in-kernel or
alsa-drivers is recommended. Because it's been going back and forth for
years as to which gets priority in the docs. Pick something for the
users to install and stick with it, please.