[RFC] disable OSS sound support

[Jon Masters]

On Mon, 2009-02-16 at 09:49 +0000, Bastien Nocera wrote:
> On Fri, 2009-02-13 at 10:16 -0500, Jon Masters wrote:
> > On Fri, 2009-02-13 at 10:22 +0100, Kevin Kofler wrote:
> > > Warren Togami wrote:

> > > The problem with that is that they will continue saying "PulseAudio broke my
> > > apps". If we just remove OSS sound support entirely, they won't have a
> > > reason to blame PulseAudio anymore.
> > 
> > I love that logic. And by love, I mean I really don't. PulseAudio is
> > great, but there is a use case for OSS without PA in the loop still.
> 
> Where is there still a need for it? Apps that are still using OSS had
> about 8 years to switch to ALSA, why do you think they'd be doing it
> now?

I don't. That's the shocking thing about ABIs between kernel and
userspace - we kind of guarantee them not to break randomly. I've got
plenty of applications that don't use ALSA and never will (some of them
from great Linux companies long since no longer with us) and yet it
would be nice if we didn't just stop them from working on a whim. I'd
much prefer to replace OSS support with e.g. the CUSE solution in a
future Fedora instead.

But like I said, I don't /really/ care that much. This is kind of a
"won't somebody please think of the children" response I suppose.

> >  And
> > I fail to see why breaking those apps is a win - if you're that worried,
> > pop up a notification to alert the user that something else has grabbed
> > the audio device away.
> 
> Which apps? And please don't tell me "internal apps that I've never seen
> actually running and that nobody told me about".

Old Linux games, lots of commercial stuff.

Jon.