system-config-soundcard: why?

[Andrew Haley]

Jesse Keating wrote:
> On Tue, 2008-03-25 at 17:12 -0400, Bill Nottingham wrote:
>> Jesse Keating (jkeating at redhat.com) said: 
>>>> So, why do we need this in the default install?
>>> Why do we need this at all?  Is it time for a block-pkg ?
>> Well, I could argue why do we need csh, or 20 IRC clients, or apps written
>> in Motif/lesstif, or applets that check for new mail by parsing a RSS feed
>> in perl (with passwords written to the local disk, yay), and a variety of
>> things that I'm sure other people have a need for. Doesn't necessarily mean
>> they should be *blocked*, just not in the default install.
> 
> Yes, but if system-config-soundcard isn't actually solving any issues,
> are we just maintaining it out of anger?  At some point we really need
> to ask, what is the point of having this software?  Has it outlived it's
> usefulness?  We can orphan it and see if somebody wants to pick it up,
> but we can ask them the same thing, why?

On my Fedora 8 laptop, a Dell using an Intel "soundcard" with snd-intel8x0,
system-config-soundcard contains the only volume control that actually has
enough gain to make sound audible.  I would not have been able to use sound
without system-config-soundcard.  I don't know how much Fedora 9 has improved,
but I sure hope we don't delete something that I found to be vital.

Andrew.