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/pkgreport.cgi?users=debian-rele...@lists.debian.org;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. _______________________________________________ gNewSense-dev mailing list gNewSense-dev@nongnu.org http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/gnewsense-dev