ALSA in a 2.6 world

[Russell Coker]

On Sat, 17 Apr 2004 04:27, Thorsten Leemhuis <fedora at leemhuis.info> wrote:
> > The plan is for 2-3 releases a year, and it seems that so far we are
> > doing reasonably well in meeting that plan.  Is using a 4-6 month old
> > version of ALSA really that bad?
>
> IMHO:
> 	Libs, Utils:	Not really.
> 	Driver:		Yes.
>
> As long as Hardware-Vendors don't provide Linux-Drivers that are
> installable in an *easy* way *we* need to provide device-driver updates
> during lifetime of the current Fedora Core version to support newly
> released hardware. Sound-Cards are a nice example, there are many other.

Installing a kernel from rawhide is quite easy, and generally there should not 
be any problems with it.  I think you can safely assume that newer kernels 
will be available reasonably often if you don't restrict yourself to main 
Fedora releases.

> > Also if you know what you are doing
>
> than you can often fix it yourself ;-) Fedora target is not exactly the
> end-user, but I think we have enough users that don't know how to fix
> such things. Look at fedora mailing lists for examples ;-)

True.  However testing a new kernel for release takes a significant amount of 
effort.  Just doing a quick compile and throwing it to the users isn't going 
to make many people happy!  Providing the very latest kernel at all times 
conflicts with the goal of providing software that is tested and known to be 
reasonably reliable.

I think that if you want to have the latest kernel at all times then you just 
need to know enough to solve these problems, including compiling your own 
kernel on occasion.

-- 
http://www.coker.com.au/selinux/   My NSA Security Enhanced Linux packages
http://www.coker.com.au/bonnie++/  Bonnie++ hard drive benchmark
http://www.coker.com.au/postal/    Postal SMTP/POP benchmark
http://www.coker.com.au/~russell/  My home page