[Pkg-alsa-devel] Re: Ubuntu: the alsa-utils/alsaconf problem

[Thomas Hood]

Matt Zimmerman wrote:
> I'm following the advice of the Debian ALSA maintainers (CCed) who have said
> that this tool is obsolete.


alsaconf is obsolete to the same degree that ISA hardware is.  ;)

alsaconf used to write a large module loader configuration file.  All of the
most important bits of this file are now included in /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.
The file that alsaconf now generates is rather useless on all systems except
for some systems with ISA soundcards, and even for those I am not sure that
what it generates is correct.

What I would like to do is to further hack on alsaconf so that it doesn't
write out any module loader configuration file at all, but just prints out
information on the console.  This would be sufficiently useful for ISA
folks and for debugging purposes and it would be more maintainable.

alsaconf is still shipped in Debian alsa-utils because users keep telling
us they need it; and from time to time we get a bug report that says
"sound doesn't work unless I run alsaconf".  Such a bug can easily be
resolved; but if alsaconf were absent then all such reports would say
"sound doesn't work" and it would be much harder to solve the user's
problem.


>   * Don't ignore the modprobe.d directory if modprobe.conf is present,
>     just load all of them; this behaviour is very confusing for most users.


I agree with this.  It was a terrible misfeature for modprobe to ignore
modprobe.d if modprobe.conf existed!  Gah.  Debian alsaconf hasn't created
modprobe.conf for a long time, but upstream's alsaconf does do so, I think.
-- 
Thomas