On Sat, Oct 04, 2003 at 09:09:18PM -0400, Warren wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> During meetings at Real yesterday in Seattle, the subject of OSS vs Alsa
> came up.  Currently, the player uses OSS, but in the current linux
> kernels (2.6 series and the 2.5 development series) OSS has been
> depreciated in favor of alsa.  Additionally, many distributions that use
> the older 2.4 kernels ship alsa as well.
> 
> Therefore I am proposing that the new player be written to support alsa
> rather than oss.  I was told that it would be best to let the community
> at large decide this.
> 
> Therefore I submit this question for discussion:  Should the GTK player
> be wrotten to support OSS or ALSA?

One of the biggest factors to take into consideration is probably that ALSA
does OSS emulation, but not vice versa.  If we support only ALSA, then users
who have only OSS cannot use the player.  OTOH, if we support only OSS, all
users can use the player.

I would personally like to see both supported, perhaps with a note saying
that OSS is deprecated.  This would need to be done via plugins so that the
main app isn't linked against libasound.

Full disclosure: I used OSS exclusively until a couple of years ago, when I
got a machine with a Via chipset that was not supported in kernel 2.2 (this
is before I really trusted 2.4 to be stable).  I used ALSA (on this machine
only) until I moved to 2.4, at which time I switched back to OSS.  ALSA has
always worked very well for me but I don't like having to recompile extra
stuff when I upgrade the kernel.  And that huge stack of modules it loads
made me kinda wary.  Now that I'm using 2.6.0-test kernels on my workstation
machines, I've switched to ALSA exclusively and it's been working great.

-- 
One of the saddest lessons of history is this:  If we've been bamboozled
long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle.  We're no
longer interested in finding out the truth.
        -- Carl Sagan, "The Fine Art of Baloney Detection"
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