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Giving up ALSA?

Well, after my post about the problems I encounter maintaining ALSA, and dsd’s reply, I’m seriously considering stopping maintaining ALSA.

One thing that might not be clear is that even if I maintain “only” the alsa-driver package, I’m also maintaining alsa-lib, alsa-utils, alsa-tools alsa-everything, and I get bug reports even when the in-kernel driver is used if alsa-lib crashes because of a userland<->kernel misalignment. This is why I’d rather avoid bugs from users using in-kernel drivers altogether.

But seems like my ideas have no value to anyone else just because they got ALSA working fine with in-kernel drivers. Okay, I accept this. Up to you guys to maintain it from now on then, let’s see if you can solve something.

Please note that I never asked for exclusive maintainership of ALSA: all the packages have the maintainer set to sound team, which means that anybody in the sound project can take care of them; I even wrote a maintainer’s guide to let others know what’s going on. Even with this, while I was offline, nobody bumped ALSA. Why?

Even the fact that I had to “fight” and lost against the documentation team about what should have been suggested to users about ALSA is, to me, a symptom that anybody is ready to maintain all the packages, what do I know?

So, as I said, I’m tired of this task that procures me nothing but blames, bashing and sore blood. For the first time even 3 or 4 users who thank me aren’t enough to keep me on my seat, because for every one who thank me there seems to be at least 4 that think they know better (there might not be so many of them, but they are vocal). So let them take care of it, I have better things to do with the little free time I have than trying to relax after the nerves I get from discussing ALSA problems.

Comments 8
  1. I think it is very sad that you are stopping maintaining ALSA packages. I guess I’ll have to get used to using my own overlay or keep on using 1.0.12 indefinately until I am forced to use inline kernel ALSA.If you decide you want to keep maintaining ALSA stuff and I can be of service, please let me know.

  2. I really wonder how many people realize it’s not just alsa-driver which you’re maintaining and is necessary for ALSA to work properly.Anyway, whether you’re stopping maintaining ALSA or not, I’d like to thank you for your work since I’ve hardly had any trouble with it in the past.

  3. this sucks. i use alsa-driver & frieds packages and it works better for me than in-kernel solution for me (i had a couple of ugly lockups with kernel alsa on modprobe).and there are definitely more than 4 of us 😉

  4. Thats sad :(Anyway, I want to be one more to thank you for your hard work in the multimedia packages of Gentoo.

  5. Diego as stop maintaining alone this packages the sound herd will take care of it as usual. No need to worriesThanks Diego for your work we know you did a good job.

  6. It’s sad to hear you will stop maintaining ALSA. I never had any problems with alsa-driver and friends while you were maintaining them. A litte bit less ALSA related I’d like to thank you for your efforts on bringing PulseAudio to life in Gentoo – it’s working really great for me.

  7. Please, please please do not stop supporting/building the alsa packages for the portage tree.At the moment i have no sound on my laptop and am talking with the alsa-devs and hoping to get a fix in the next versions.Thank you very, very much for building the alsa packages for gentoo.

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