[Pkg-alsa-devel] init script

[Jordi Mallach]

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Hi guys,

StevenK: glad to hear from you!

Sorry, I cannot log into IRC now, but I would like to discuss this quite
more directly. Anyway, maybe tomorrow.

Before uploading -drive 1.0.4-1, I went to talk to Md on IRC about the
"fix" EE and I had devised: we planned blacklisting all sound modules,
both ALSA and OSS drivers. As I suspected he thought this was totally
broken and wouldn't help at all.

He said the only real and sane solution would be to get rid of the ALSA
driver loading in alsa-base entirely. I guess you know I wouldn't have
too many problems if this approach was adopted, and we delegated the
responsability of module loading on hotplug, udev or simply
/etc/modules.

In fact, he sent me a new version of the init script that does exactly
this: removes all module loading/unloading support, and just retains the
mixer storing/restoring code. As it was quite late and I wans't able to
think of how would this impact our other packages (alsa-source and
alsa-modules would surely need changes), I held the fixing of the
hotplug stuff until after the 1.0.4 release, which was good enough to
get in unstable by itself. Later, Md sent me another small snippet that
actually adds some modprobe.d hooks to get the oss emu layer loaded
correctly.

I see StevenK has done commits that start addressing the hotplug problem
in CVS. The question is if we should take this route or just hand the
responsability of loading the modules to someone else. I have no clear
opinion, because I have probably not seen what the full impact of this
would be.

Do we really lose functionality here? (there's the card ordering thing
and the reloading of modules when you upgrade alsa-modules-foo, but
honestly I think the script is giving us more headaches than advantages:
according to Md, udev can easily handle the ordering feature -if you
don't just use /etc/modules- and we have some bugs of annoyed users that
can't upgrade alsa-modules without leaving their X session because the
sound dev is being used). What's your view on this?

Jordi
--=20
Jordi Mallach P=E9rez  --  Debian developer     http://www.debian.org/
jordi@sindominio.net     jordi@debian.org     http://www.sindominio.net/
GnuPG public key information available at http://oskuro.net/~jordi/

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