ALSA and OSS

[Robert Millan]

Hi,

As you might know, packages that assume ALSA is provided are one of the most
common reasons for a package to FTBFS on GNU/kFreeBSD.

I fear that, when Linux 2.4 is no longer supported by Debian, the situation can
go much worse.  Maintainers could start disabling use of OSS interface because
it's "deprecated", or even requesting removals of packages because they only
support OSS and not ALSA.

One of the things that can be done is packaging ossalsalib (aka libsalsa) for
Debian.  This would give us a lousy replacement for libasound.  Won't work
reasonably well, but at least we get rid of FTBFS problems.  Unfortunately the
upstream code contains stuff specific to the non-free OSS implementation by
4Front, and needs some work to compile with normal OSS, even on GNU/Linux.
(and I lack the time to do this, I'm afraid)

Another option could be a d-d-a mail explaining the situation, or asking the
release team for how long we're going to support Linux 2.4 in Debian.

Any suggestions?

-- 
Robert Millan