[Gnewsense-dev] Re: OSSv4 default sound on parkes?

[Yavor Doganov]

Steven McDonald wrote:
> Some potential disadvantages of OSSv4 are:

  * Porting all applications -- that's hell of a job.  REALLY.

Traditionally, sound-related applications have been using OSS.  When
ALSA came up, almost all of them got ported to it, and this took quite
some time.  Now that OSS is disabled in many GNU/Linux distros, it is
actually a bug (in Debian/Fedora at least) if the package still uses
OSS by default; see
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/address@hidden;tag=oss-removal.

Judging by how long was (and still ongoing!) the OSS->ALSA migration,
I anticipate you'd have a hard time implementing OSSv4 support
everywhere, *plus* making it the default, *plus* convincing upstream
authors to incorporate the patches.

More importantly, I'm not sure the effort is necessary.  ALSA is
pretty much the norm on GNU/Linux (anything that's out of the kernel
tree can't possibly compete with it, and even if it gets in it'll take
time to reach ALSA's popularity, feature completeness _and_ maturity).
OSS is much better on GNU/kFreeBSD, where by "much better" I mean
better than it ever was on GNU/Linux.  GNU/Hurd doesn't have sound
support (yet).  Abstraction libraries like libao do a good job to
provide the best alternative on almost all important porting targets,
and their usage is growing.

I think this is a battle with unimportant and dubious goals, not worth
the trouble.