[pkg-wine-party] Bug#854020: Wine does not longer work with OSS

[Simon McVittie]

Control: severity 854020 important

On Fri, 03 Feb 2017 at 08:09:33 +0100, Klaus Ethgen wrote:
> OSS is the only sound system working. (Currently oss4 4.2-build2010-5)

It seems you have chosen to use an out-of-tree audio driver that is
not part of the Linux kernel. I'm pretty sure this does not make
wine unusable in general, so it is at most 'important' severity
(and I'm being generous there).

Linux's platform-native API for audio is ALSA, so I would recommend
using ALSA and the in-tree drivers, together with a user-space audio
mixer such as PulseAudio or dmix. If ALSA does not work for you, please
open a bug in an appropriate package (probably not wine, unless the
issue is Wine-specific and general audio playback using ALSA works
as expected).

The oss4 package has unfixed release-critical bugs that make it very
likely to be excluded from the next stable release of Debian; OSS4
support was removed because the alternative would have been to
exclude wine and wine-development from the next stable release as
well, which I hope you would agree does not provide a solution for
your use-case either.

If you must use OSS, using it via its libasound compatibility layer would
not put key packages like wine in danger of being removed when oss4 has
release-critical bugs. Unfortunately, that compatibility layer does
not seem to be very well-integrated in the Debian packaging (#703843,
#770491, #668812, #614765, which are all bugs in the oss4 source package).

If you are using oss4 successfully, your help with the maintenance of
the oss4 source package would probably be appreciated.

Regards,
    S