[Pkg-oss4-maintainers] Help (voodoo, really) needed [Re: failed i386 build of iceweasel 11.0~b1-2]

[Romain Beauxis]

Hi all,

2012/2/18 Julien Cristau <jcristau at debian.org>:
> On Fri, Feb 17, 2012 at 18:36:56 +0100, Mike Hommey wrote:
>
>> Oh, so OSS4 provides an Alsa API that is not compatible with Alsa's.
>> Awesome.
>>
> The oss4 package should die a painful death.

2012/2/18 Josselin Mouette <joss at debian.org>:
> Le vendredi 17 février 2012 à 22:13 +0100, Axel Beckert a écrit :
>> Ben Hutchings wrote:
>> > 'Let the user choose' is almost as stupid an idea for drivers as it
>> > is for health insurance.
>>
>> I.e. it is a good idea?
>
> This question would be funny if so many politicians weren’t spreading
> such shit around.
>
>> > No-one wants to think about that, they just want their shit to work.
>>
>> I disagree. Choice is one of the strengths of free software.
>
> Wrong, wrong, wrong again, and again wrong.
> http://www.redhat.com/archives/rhl-devel-list/2008-January/msg00861.html

(I haven't been involved in oss4 packaging for a while now but since I
did write the original ITP I feel like I could drop my 2 cents..)

I find it interesting to have such very sharp comments on a package
that has been around for quite some times now.

Regardless, if we go down the path of making straight up choices for
our users, I'd suggest that we also get rid of either Gnome or KDE..
They already don't fit both in our install medias anymore, right?

More seriously there are people who care about their sound drivers in
more specific ways than the average user who "just wants his shit to
work" (sic). There are also people using OSes that do not have ALSA
and, interestingly, we happen to support some of those.

I am personally all about our making choices as a distribution as to
which set of software we choose to focus on. However, it is also
possible to provide alternatives that have a smaller user base but are
nevertheless interesting for some people.

Romain