[Pkg-alsa-devel] RFC: alsa-driver update

[Jordi Mallach]

Hi,

I've been holding this for way too long already, but it really needs a
resolution now.

There are several bugs affecting the release against the alsa-driver package.
The most prominent is that a a few drivers have non-free blobs in it, #483918.

There are also many functionality bugs in several driver and laptops which is
fixed in the new upstream release. Finally, alsa-source 1.0.16 will not compile
against 2.6.25 (so I guess compiles against 2.6.26 are even worse).

Fixing many of this issues isn't that easy in the current version in lenny,
1.0.16, so for a long time our plan was to ship the complete ALSA 1.0.17
release. 1.0.17 got released a bit later than we expected, so I gave up as the
freeze was already in place.

However, fixing these problems in 1.0.16 is challenging and IMO, with lenny
shipping 2.6.26, has little point. Lenny's kernel will have ALSA drivers
1.0.17, so syncing alsa-source to the kernel version is a good idea.

One of the reasons to hold this was that I wasn't sure if using alsa-lib 1.0.16
with alsa-source 1.0.17 would be a problem do to config missmatches or
whatever. After weeks of 2.6.26 in unstable, it doesn't look like it is.

Of course, alsa-lib 1.0.17 fixes another set of problems, but as it bumps the
shlibs (3 or 4 symbols added), I left it out of the question.

So, SVN is ready with a 1.0.16.dfsg-1 release to be uploaded. The bump of
version number only affects the alsa-source package, alsa-base is not affected
as it is all debian-only code. Also, alsa-source is optional, users will only
be affected by the version bump if they manually compile an alsa-modules
package out of it. That is a great minority of the users.

I think uploading only alsa-driver 1.0.17 to lenny is the easiest way to fix
the current RC problems in the package. If this isn't allowed in, we'll need
help backporting driver and compilation fixes to 1.0.16, as we're currently a
bit short on manpower on the ALSA team.

Jordi
-- 
Jordi Mallach Pérez  --  Debian developer     http://www.debian.org/
jordi at sindominio.net     jordi at debian.org     http://www.sindominio.net/
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