Re: NetBSD's sound system

[Pierre Pronchery <khorben%defora.org@localhost>]

                        Hey,

On Tue, 25 Sep 2012 10:07:02 +0000, Zbigniew wrote:
> 
> That's NOT EXACTLY the point. The point was: wouldn't it be reasonable
> to replace the existing NetBSD's sound system with 4fronts' OpenSound
> (used and proven in FreeBSD)? Such way that "someone" would be current
> maintainers... no need to look for new "someone".

first, NetBSD doesn't have an army of maintainers, or people dedicated to 
the sound stack. It's an Open Source project, often developed by 
volunteers during their spare time. The current "someones" must not have 
felt like supporting 4Front's audio stack was a priority (neither have 
the folks at 4Front themselves).

Then, (and I am obviously not speaking for the NetBSD project here) I am 
pretty sure the current API (audioio) is not going to be replaced any 
time soon. If I am correct it is also found on other systems, and this 
allows developers to support more platforms while writing code once, 
which is a good thing (tm). There is even a compatibility layer exposing 
an OSS API.

> OpenSound seems to be more "mature" and to support larger variety of
> sound cards. Since it was able to support NetBSD 3.1, most probably
> there aren't much changes required to make it fully compatible with
> 5.1.2.

Now, I'm sure OpenSound is great, and surely their newer OSS API has 
support for more features than the one supported at the moment by NetBSD. 
It would be a great addition, but indeed, "someone" has to do it. Be our 
guest.

Cheers,
-- 
khorben