ALSA and OSS

[Aurelien Jarno]

Robert Millan a écrit :
> Hi,
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.

True, that's one of the reasons of a package to FTBFS that is on the 
not-yet-build list, though this is not the most common reason 
(libtool/config.{guess,sub}).

> 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)

Well if it doesn't work well, this solution only hides the FTBFS 
problem, and does not provide a solution. If we want the package to be 
built but not work, it could be faster to provide empty .deb files...

> 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.

That doesn't work. I have already done that for selinux, and it doesn't 
work. I even have the feeling that it increased the packages with 
selinux enabled, as I said it is a target for etch to enable selinux.

> Any suggestions?
> 
The solution I use for selinux is to report a bug if there is a 
build-dependency on libselinux1-dev, with a patch to remove this 
build-dependency for kfreebsd-i386. This way each concerned maintainer 
get the information.

The same could be done for libasound2-dev, except that we have to test 
the program builds well without alsa (for some programs we also need to 
pass or remove an option to configure), so that it could only be done in 
a semi-automatically manner.

I already thought of something like that, but as I found the 
"libasound2-dev [!kfreebsd-i386]" build-dependency ugly, I decided to 
wait for the new dpkg. As it doesn't come, maybe we could just go with 
"[!kfreebsd-i386]" ?

Bye,
Aurelien

-- 
   .''`.  Aurelien Jarno	            | GPG: 1024D/F1BCDB73
  : :' :  Debian GNU/Linux developer | Electrical Engineer
  `. `'   aurel32 at debian.org         | aurelien at aurel32.net
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