Sound support on potato

[Eray Ozkural <exa@ttnet.net.tr>]

Hi,

Ahem, this has been discussed before, but I think there are slight problems
with the state of "sound support" on potato. I think many people who use
debian will also want to use GNOME. Even if not, they will want to use
ordinary sound devices working properly if they have sound hardware installed.
The problems as I see them are:

   o esd: this program depends on alsa, I know esd's author doesn't care about
it much. IMHO such programs shouldn't depend on alsa, or any specific sound
driver. That should be flexible. All gnome packages depend on alsa, so that's
problematic. If he can't maintain it, some else can. (the author)

   o alsa: still we have the 0.4.x versions in potato. And may I remind you
that 0.4.x versions are obsolete? Is it a custom to make obsolete software
to go in the "stable" version? 0.5.x are the stable upstream releases. There
might be a few things that will work better with the old versions, so either
     i) throw those packages away, since most of the stuff works well with oss
     emulation. if they don't work with the new modules, who cares?
     ii) if they require old versions of the libs, those libs could be maintained
     in oldlibs section.

   o alsa packages: These packages have slight problems. I think the decomposition
of alsa into alsa-base and alsa-modules... hasn't been studied enough. Don't
ask me for advice, it doesn't look good...

   o "other" sound drivers: I think it's a good idea to make other kernel sound
drivers as module packages as they are available. For instance, there's a not-very-good
SB Live! driver from creative.

The problems with the alsa packages are, IMHO, quite urgent and should be fixed
some time. I don't think that the maintainer reads the bug reports at all, anyway.
For the argument that "These packages are stable, and many prudent packages use them",
I would like to suggest taking the author's opinion on this subject. I'm quite confident
that the author will suggest the latest stable releases for distribution. (version
0.5.7)

In addition, there seem to be some sound applications which could be included in potato. 
Perhaps those could be made into one of those mythical "potato updates" that people have
been talking about.

Thanks,

-- 
 ++++-+++-+++-++-++-++--+---+----+----- ---  --  -  - 
 +  Eray "exa" Ozkural                   .      .   .  . . .
 +  CS, Bilkent University, Ankara             ^  .  o   .      .
 |  mail: erayo@cs.bilkent.edu.tr                .  ^  .   .