[Pkg-alsa-devel] Alsa-utils mixer init script

[David Henningsson]

Hi pkg-alsa-devel and congratulations on the 6.0 release! :-)

Ubuntu inherits a mixer init script from Debian. There are several 
issues with this script:

1) Mic input is muted on boot - this is not terrible IMO but a minor 
annoyance for people who like things to work out of the box. I could 
probably fix this to just mute with the "nocap" option, without much 
work. That's the easy one.

2) Asynchronous problem - as Lennart Poettering pointed out [1] this 
script is executed asynchronously so it is not guaranteed to have 
finished when PulseAudio discovers the card. PulseAudio might take these 
mixer changes as changes by the user, and preserve them. His version is 
to execute a mixer restore script both on udev rule and on the file 
system showing up (?), since we don't know which one will happen first [2].

3) Upstream has started their own solution with "alsactl init" the stuff 
in /usr/share/alsa/init - and so our solution is in conflict, and we 
don't use upstream's version.

Anyway, since Ubuntu inherits this script from Debian, it makes sense to 
try to fix it at the Debian level. What are your opinions on this 
script? Should we throw it away it for upstream's "alsactl init" 
solution, and if so, how?

-- 
David Henningsson, Canonical Ltd.
http://launchpad.net/~diwic

[1] 
http://mailman.alsa-project.org/pipermail/alsa-devel/2010-November/033910.html

[2] 
http://mailman.alsa-project.org/pipermail/alsa-devel/2010-November/033884.html