[Pkg-oss4-maintainers] Bug#557902: Bug#557902: oss4-base: disables ALSA without asking

[Norbert Preining]

Hi Romain,

On Mi, 25 Nov 2009, Romain Beauxis wrote:
> > installing oss4-base disables ALSA without asking and without
> > any interference, and in addition does not provide automatically
> > some for the running kernel.
> > 
> > In addition, there is NO documentation about what to do and how
> > to configure this package or achive some swithcing result.
> > 
> > Could you please put a bit of work into that.
> 
> Thanks for your report.
> 
> Believe it or not, we put some work in this package.

I *know*, sorry if you got me wrong, I asked you to put some work
into the issues I reported!! Sorry for my mis-formulation!!!
You have done a nice job.

> Providing default kernel modules could be an interesting option and we should 
> consider it at some point.

That is not intereesting for me, but you might think about a dkms
module. Since I am using always the latest -rc kernel (since writing my
own kernel modules) I can anyway not profit from stock debian kernels,
but many module-source packages now ship dkms enabled stuff which 
auto-builds the modules.

> Concerning the desactivation of ALSA, it can be made optional. However, I 
> believe that a user that installs oss4 is well aware that this needs to 
> disable ALSA, so I don't think that the fact that the package disables ALSA is 
> confusing to him.

Well I want to switch between OSS4 and ALSA. There are some packages that
simply don't work nicely with OSS4 (skype for example), and that
.alsarc magic never worked out anyway. Other than that I am very happy
about OSS4, because in contrast to ALSA it allowed mixing of different
streams out of the box (ALSA wiki says: It is enabled for all known cards
bla bla bla, but it simply doesn't work on my hda-intel).

> Additionally, if you want to re-enable ALSA, you may simply remove the oss4-
> core package.

Agreed. But you could do some script
	sound-switch-to alsa|oss
which would be great ;-)

Anyway, take it as suggestions.

Best wishes

Norbert

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Dr. Norbert Preining                                        Associate Professor
JAIST Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology   preining at jaist.ac.jp
Vienna University of Technology                               preining at logic.at
Debian Developer (Debian TeX Task Force)                    preining at debian.org
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