Comment 75 for bug 579300

So OSS doesn't support some advanced features? Sure. But why does that mean OSS support needs to be broken? If users of some OSS-only app want these features, they can bug the authors to add support for PA or whatever.

As for grabbing devices exclusively, I'm under the impression that it's possible for a long time to allow even OSS apps to access devices in parallel with ALSA. At least I haven't had problems with that for years now.

Space for these three modules is 124K on my system....

And really: in this particular case I don't understand the necessity of the removal. It's not that OSS is a system foundation and it's just too limited for the future. It's just an ADDON. You can safely ignore it if your apps all use ALSA. If you want to get it out of the main kernel, then at least provide it as a separate package, e.g. using DKMS.

Besides the fact, that aoss (and possibly padsp) does not really work, it's also much less comfortable. OSS emulation modules "just work", with aoss you have to find out about it first. Then find out what and how to change. Probably nothing the average user is able to.

And sure there are guides to compile a kernel. Still it's not exactly a 5min job. And when will this advanced kernel build system see the light of day? Nobody knows? That's not a great base for an alternative solution. And again: it takes hours! On every update! I don't want to imagine how log it takes on a netbook... And what for? For three tiny modules!

Also in my experience with Ubuntu it's unfortunately only partly possible to stick with an LTS release. There is just always a breakage wich is only fixed in the next release. In my example with Lucid the broken radeon driver. Also sometimes you just need a newer version of some software. E.g. the latest KDE is only supported for the last two Ubuntu releases or so. So you want to tell users: Sorry you can't upgrade to a newer desktop shell, if you want to keep the mixer of you TV app working?

So telling users to stick with LTS is only partly an option. Let alone that I don't have much faith everything will be fixed with say the next LTS.

The solution is pretty simple: readd the modules in some way or another! It hurts nobody (unless proved otherwise) and every other "solution" is just inferior.

PS: In my case the app is tvtime and what doesn't work is the mixer (i.e. adjusting volume).