[MPlayer-dev-eng] [patch] prefer ALSA over OSS

[Rich Felker]

On Sat, May 05, 2007 at 12:29:50AM +0200, Adrian Bunk wrote:
> > The problem here is that both the API and the implementation are
> > horrible. My complaints stand.
> > 
> > Also ALSA the implementation and ALSA the API are inseparable because
> > the API is not documented and there has been no attempt to make it an
> > open standard where multiple implementations are possible. Indeed I
> > suspect the API itself is nonportable in the sense that it's not
> > suited for use on posix systems other than Linux unless they do things
> > in Linux-like ways.
> 
> Hannu Savolainen said [1]:
> 
> So we took a different approach - namely modifying the libasound (ALSA 
> lib) to talk to OSS drivers rather than ALSA drivers and this approach 
> looks more easily portable - for instance it's possible to support ALSA 
> library on FreeBSD or Solaris.

This is definitely possible, and it's what should have been done on
Linux to begin with. Then, applications wanting to use the horrible
library API could use it, but a proper clean kernel interface (OSS
API) would also be available.

Of course libasound should still be rejected just because the API is
bad. I haven't looked at jack but I suspect it's a much better API.
And of course there are plenty of older APIs too.

Rich