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

[Michiel de Bruijne <m.debruijne@hccnet.nl>]

On Friday 25 November 2005 15:21, Chris Gianelloni wrote:
> 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)

Thanks, for this clear answer and your explanation (Spider as well). Now I 
know that some hardware or programs still need oss and to make is as easy as 
possible for ordinary users it should stay in the default profile. However on 
the systems I maintain I see different behaviour then what you described 
below.


> 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.

All the systems I maintain have -oss and don't have alsa-oss installed (I do 
have activated OSS emulation in the kernel though). All the games I have 
installed on those systems (including RTCW and ET) work perfectly. That 
doesn't off course say that all Gentoo-based systems or all games work 
without problems, but I'm trying to say that the dependency on alsa might not 
be as necessary as you seem to think.


> > > 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.

Shouldn't 2.4 users use a 2.4 profile? (if they don't they have other 
"challenges" as well e.g. udev vs. devfs). oss turned on by default in a 2.4 
profile makes perfect sense to me.


> > 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.

I understand, thanks!
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