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I *will* say “I told you that^Wso”

Edit: thanks to Mike Arthur for letting me remember I got the phrase wrong, the permalink will have to stay wrong to avoid confusion though :/

So today’s news are that a bunch of people who never seemed to care about ALSA (sorry Tony but iirc you said that yourself) now will be the new ALSA maintainers. And their first action is to flush down the toilet the months of work I’ve put in making sure that the official alsa-driver package works.

Okay, well, their responsibility.. but again, what about those people who need to use alsa-driver? While Josh (nightmorph) agrees that it’s more than 2.4, Daniel seems to care about it just for 2.4 and those few extra drivers on it. Tell you what: neither my boxes can run in-kernel ALSA, as they both die with it.

And has any of them tried to contact me? I told to them already that the ALSA maintainer’s guide is incomplete, were they able to fill the gaps that I haven’t been able to update before leaving without asking? Maybe.

But with all due respect, Steve wasn’t able to find time to proxy-commit the ebuilds I already prepared for ALSA, Petteri did it.

Do they know about the six bugs that I’ve opened on the ALSA bugs tracker that are patched in Gentoo?

For the way it has been handled, I do think Daniel is just trying to get revenge for my handling of ALSA, sorry Daniel, I respect you, but you’re dead set on the wrong way to see the issue this time. And I’m pretty sure that it will create problems.

I don’t think I handled ALSA all that bad, I didn’t get any help by any other developer, and Daniel tried to push me off track once or twice, but there weren’t many users complaining about ALSA not working… while we all know what happened on the 1.0.8 to 1.0.9 update (or do we? rather, do they? I was there, not sure where they were on that one); genstef failed already once trying to take over ALSA from me, by the way, and if it wasn’t for my proxied commit, ALSA 1.0.14_rc3 wouldn’t have been in the tree most likely (released 6 March, my ebuild was ready on 7th, Petteri committed it at 17 March after leaving some time to see if someone else was going to pick it up).

Anyway, with the future in hands of those devs, I think I won’t restrain myself from saying “I told you so” when, in a couple of months, you’ll hear users complaining about their VIA82xx card or their HDA card not working. Bets are open on when the first signs of something broken will appear.

Oh, someone in there is going to actually take care of what I left incomplete (ld10k1 init script), or is that not cool enough?

Comments 6
  1. Sounds fair enough to me mate.Not meaning to be rude, but generally you say “I told you SO” not “I told you THAT”.Keep up the blogging!

  2. I’ve got to admit, I’ve always thought compiling the external alsa-drivers were more problem than worth it. When I’ve had ALSA failures majority of the time, through no fault of your own, there was a compilation problem with them due to me using $git version or $git tree. I use mine semi-professionally, and when the in-kernel alsa drivers suck I’m first to know. This has only happened once in 5 years, and that was due to the mixer changing and I ended up missing a day of recording, which would have happened either way. I’m sure you’ve got a good reason to believe that the external alsa-drivers are superior, but I’ve never needed them.

  3. Although I myself have been concerned about the future of Alsa in Gentoo (the sound team isn’t exactly the most responsive we have (yes that includes me too)), I believe that you lost all rights to complain the day you left us.

  4. And I lost all requirement to help too, but I’ve been doing it anyway. Why? Because I care.But I’ll keep in mind that you don’t need me then, and won’t help anymore, as you wish, then.

  5. Well, it’s not like alsa-driver is being pulled from the tree immediately or anything.And no, dsd isn’t trying for anything as petty as “revenge.” All he wants to do is streamline the maintenance process for the kernel team and avoid what he perceives as some duplication of effort. (I know, you and he disagree on whether it is duplicated effort or not.)Speaking of 2.4, all 2.4-related stuff will be pulled from the tree soon enough, so that will obviate *some* of the need for alsa-driver (but not all). As you know, the 2.4 kernel for x86 has been masked for some time and will be removed shortly, and there are no recent 2.4 profiles available for any arch. (For 2007.0, there won’t be one for Sparc either.)Regarding ld10k1, remember that we had a notice for it in /topic on #gentoo-dev for at least a month with no takers; evidently it requires some highly specialized knowledge?

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