Re: [gentoo-releng] oss in make.defaults for 2006.0?

[Chris Gianelloni <wolf31o2@gentoo.org>]

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On Fri, 2005-11-25 at 15:05 +0100, Spider (D.m.D. Lj.) wrote:
> On Fri, 2005-11-25 at 11:00 +0100, Michiel de Bruijne wrote:
> > On Friday 25 November 2005 10:24, Luca Barbato wrote:
> > > Michiel de Bruijne wrote:
> > > > Now that useflags are evaluated for the 2006.0 profile (e.g. nptl and
> > > > apache2) I wonder if it's still necessary to have oss in make.defaults?
> > > > The replacement (alsa) is preferred by kernel developers for almost 2
> > > > years. Time to remove it from the 2006.0 profile?

Never... going... to... happen... (don't worry, I'll explain)

> > > I'd have a look at how many software are using oss only and how many
> > > have good alsa support, not to mention which drivers are oss only or
> > > work better as oss.

The software that primarily supports OSS only is my other area in
Gentoo... games.

There's no way that we can make, for example, Return to Castle
Wolfenstein or Enemy Territory, both of which are extremely popular, use
ALSA natively.  They *do* work with ALSA compiled with USE="oss" or with
alsa-oss installed.  As far as I know, the oss USE flag on ALSA only
enables the alsa-oss dependency.

> Theres a few issues here, at least Trident and via chipsets work good in
> alsa. however, due to the difficulty for programmers to use the
> alsa-api, you actually get -better- sound (less glitches and buffer
> underruns) if you use alsa-drivers + alsa-oss emulation.
> 
> This is clearly visible in Fex.  amarok (gstreamer backend) and other
> players, especially under higher system loads. (yes, even with a
> preemptive kernel)
> 
> 
> 
> > For the programs that are oss-only a useflag shouldn't even exists, because 
> > it's not optional.

For those applications, correct.  However, I have shown a good reason
for it.  Unless we simply tell anyone to always merge alsa-oss if they
want to play games, which isn't exactly a "works out of the box"
solution.  I can think of a few scenarios we could employ to work around
this, but they aren't nearly as clean as simply having OSS in the
default USE.  Personally, I think it should stay until it is removed
from the kernel, and even then, it must stay so long as we are
supporting 2.4 kernels which do not have ALSA, such as vanilla-sources.

> > All systems I maintain (about 15 different hardware/software specs) have -oss 
> > and work as expected. I'm interested if someone on this list has 
> > hardware/software where oss is preferred over alsa?
> > Does anybody knows if the default setup of other distros include 
> > "oss-compiled" packages?
> 
> Yeah, they do. At least last I checked both ubuntu and Fedora Core had
> oss as their default sound-sinks for many things. The transition period
> will take ages I'm afraid :/

I would say a very long time, indeed.

-- 
Chris Gianelloni
Release Engineering - Strategic Lead
x86 Architecture Team
Games - Developer
Gentoo Linux

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