On Tue, 30 Sep 2008 11:10:35 +0200
Thorsten Leemhuis <fedora(a)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.