> such an argument is nonsense. > do you expect that 2.6.0 kernel works flawlessly with > EVERY SINGLE driver since it's released as the "stable" > tree? and, you believe Linus shouldn't release 2.6.0 > until all modules get fixed? > > so it is for ALSA. we released 1.0.x, but not every > single driver can work well yet, unfortunately. the total > system is becoming stable, i believe, though. > > i know that via driver is often problematic. it's just > because it's the onboard chip, and it's a combination > among quite different AC97 chips. you cannot test/debut > it unless you have the *EXACTLY SAME* motherboad, CPU, and > the EXACTLY SAME kernel, compiler, linker, etc. don't > expect me to buy hundreds VIA mobos on the market only for > testing and debugging this driver module :)
I have a suggestion: I've been half-reading the ongoing complaining threads, and I think that, overall, the people doing the whining are being unreasonable. I recently bought a Creative SB Live! 5.1, counting on it having well-established Linux support. Suprise! Creative issues revised version of these cards under the same model name all the time. (Although at least they were good enough to print the model number on the box) And it turns out that there were enough subtle differences in this latest revision to break ALSA. OK, that's annoying - but neither is it suprising. Creative is under to compulsion to contact the ALSA developers each time they make a production change to their products. Often the only way for a driver developer to know about a change is for a user to buy the new card, discover it doesn't work with the current drivers, and complain. In my case, I presented a bunch of debug info, Takashi answered, and with a couple of very quick patches we got everything working except the rear speakers - and I imagine Takashi will figure out why those aren't working in reasonably short order, once he gets time. OK, here's my suggestion: It is natural for driver developers to think in terms of chipsets, because that's how the drivers are written. But users (the people doing all the whining) think in terms of PRODUCTS. It's not an EMU10k1, it's a Creative SB Live! It's not a via82xx, it's an ASUS A7V8X with onboard sound. etc. If there were a database listing product name, model number, driver, version, and functionality (much along the lines of the linux-printing folks) I think that a lot of complaining might be averted. For example, a current entry might look like: Creative SB Live 5.1 Model 9200 snd-emu10k1 v1.01 Fully functional Creative SB Live 5.1 Model CAN9600 snd-emu10k1 v1.02 Rear speakers not working yet ...or something similar. The exact schema I leave as an exercise for the web page maintainers. Give the users a means of determining AHEAD OF TIME the level of functionality they can expect, and I bet you stave off a lot of grief. DG ------------------------------------------------------- The SF.Net email is sponsored by EclipseCon 2004 Premiere Conference on Open Tools Development and Integration See the breadth of Eclipse activity. February 3-5 in Anaheim, CA. http://www.eclipsecon.org/osdn _______________________________________________ Alsa-user mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/alsa-user
