[Fedora-music-list] Alsa tools and firmware

[Tim Mayberry]

Hello all,

It seems the alsa-tools package in fedora extras is crippled as I
found out a little while ago
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=186858 and there
is no alsa-firmware package in FE.

This is a bit of a problem for people like myself who use audio
devices that need firmware to be loaded into the device before it can
be used. In the past I used the planet CCRMA alsa packages and more
recently I built and installed the alsa-tools and alsa-firmware
packages from source tarballs because at the time planet CCRMA didn't
support FC5.

Although I greatly appreciate the work of Fernando and others at
CCRMA, I don't really like the idea of replacing the whole alsa stack
when as far as I'm aware it isn't really necessary. I believe the
alsa-firmware package is not available in FE because of policy,
assuming that is still the case it would mean that the alsa-firmware
package would need to be hosted in an external repository.

I'm not aware of a precedent of a package in the Fedora Extras
repository depending on a package in an external repository but it
doesn't sound like a good idea if it can be avoided. In this case it
can by removing the crippled alsa-tools package from Fedora Extras and
keeping it an external repository along with the alsa-firmware
package.

I'm not sure if this would be the best solution or if there are issues
that meant it wouldn't be possible but I would like to help in making
it easier for Fedora to support these devices as getting them to work
at the moment is frustrating(at least to me) and beyond the capability
of what I would expect from the "average user".

Thoughts and ideas welcome...

Tim.