Okay, after my rant of two days ago about ALSA not working with kernel 2.6.17, finally version 1.0.12rc1 was released today.
This version seems to resolve all the problems with kernel 2.6.17 directly in the source code, a part the serialmidi one that I still had to patch.
A bit of insights of this release are probably needed. Since last release, 1.0.11, I’ve put, aside to alsa-jack, a media-plugins/alsa-plugins package that contains the jack plugin but also a few others, like libsamplerate’s plugins for up and downmixing, an a52 conversion plugin that uses ffmpeg, an oss output plugin, and, whenever I’m able to add PolypAudio (or whatever it’s called now) to Gentoo, also that.
Since version 1.0.12_rc1, so also for 1.0.12 final whenever it will be released, there won’t be alsa-jack anymore, and alsa-plugins will, by all means, replace it. The change is not retroactive, 1.0.10 still have only alsa-jack, and 1.0.11 have both. The change will be definitive when 1.0.12 will be marked stable on all arches (will take a bit, I hope, as I want it to be tested completely).
This is the first important note for this ALSA release. The other interests PowerPC and PowerPC 64 users, as in this release has merged snd-aoa module inside alsa-driver. I cannot test it myself, as I don’t have the hardware needed, so I just left 1.0.12_rc1 version in package.mask until this (and eventual others) problems are fixed up.
The fate of the aoa module is still unknown to me, as I haven’t talked with JoseJX yet, and he’s the media-sound/snd-aoa maintainer. It mostly depends how upstream decides to handle that: if he’s going to continue the development and sync from time to time with ALSA, it might be just simpler for me to drop aoa from our alsa-driver and leave it alone; if he now find the code stable and he’s going to follow ALSA releases, then alsa-driver would probably be the right place.
Anyway, reports and tests about this latest release are welcome.
