ALSA and OSS

[Robert Millan]

On Thu, Sep 08, 2005 at 11:09:39AM +1200, Dale Anderson wrote:
> Can you give us a bit more background re the issue , I dont quite grok 
> how this is an issue ...  , is the freebsd kernel using a OSS compat 
> audio implementation ? , I thought it used its own , and apps using a 
> sound api were ported as far as native fbsdlibc apps went via ports .
> 
> And at the end of the day the freebsd team are lilkely to be 
> maintaining patches for such are they not ?

Both Linux and kFreeBSD (and other *BSD kernels, AFAIK) provide an OSS
interface that is (mostly) compatible with the propietary OSS implementation
by 4Front.  Minor differences also exist between Linux and kFreeBSD too, for
example.

Ironicaly, the inmense majority of the free software development community
doesn't care about 4Front's non-free OSS, and writes their programs designed to
run on free OSS, usualy on Linux.  I think these usualy still work with 4Front's
due to their API being a superset of the Linux one, but I don't really know (or
care :P).

Sometimes we find minor Linux-isms in OSS programs that make them fail on
GNU/kFreeBSD.  They're usualy corrected by either expanding the kFreeBSD OSS API
or sometimes by conditionalising the features if they aren't useful.

The problem is that Linux developers chosed to be weird.  They wanted to
re-write their sound infrastructure (good!), but at the same time they chosed to
deprecate a rock-solid API like OSS in favour of Linux-specific API in
libasound (bad!).  This is not a major problem because most of the Un*x world
out there (and almost all the non-Linux free software world) depends on OSS, so
upstream apps won't be dropping OSS support in favour of ALSA (_usualy_, see
exceptions like "pmidi").

OTOH, there's the problem as it affects Debian.  Since Debian as a whole still
has the notion that it is Linux-only, this situation will bring a big deal of
problems to us.  See what Aurelien said..

-- 
Robert Millan