de-modularising for the win!

[Chuck Ebbert]

On Tue, 30 Sep 2008 11:10:35 +0200
Thorsten Leemhuis <fedora at leemhuis.info> wrote:

> The alsa-project is a good example. Say you purchase a new motherboard 
> and it has a brand new audio codec that is not yet supported by the 
> in-kernel drivers. You report that to the alsa-project and they develop 
> code to support that codec; a few days or weeks later they might tell 
> you to download alsa-driver-1.0.18-alpha1.tar.bz and compile that for 
> testing. If certain sound drivers (say snd-hda-intel) or the soundcore 
> are compiled into the kernel (like planed for Fedora) then you will 
> often be forced to recompile the whole kernel to test the new driver. 
> That's a whole lot more complicated then compiling just the 
> alsa-drivers, which is not that hard to do these days with current 
> Fedora kernels.
> 

I've got to agree, for ALSA who provide a turnkey package that lets people
test the latest drivers. Our users do compile that package and report back
whether it fixes their problems. We probably shouldn't build any sound drivers
in so they can keep doing that.