On 2010-11-23 12:42, Lennart Poettering wrote:
i.e. Ubuntu duplicates the mixer init database in an init script /sbin/alsa-utils which is moved there for weird reasons.
This is from Debian, of course, and it was moved there in Ubuntu to discourage people from running it (because it erroneously implies to people that it does magical things in alsa userspace) and because /usr might not be available. Of course when the script is removed completely, people howl. Efforts began some time ago to obsolete it (I blogged about it, even) and consolidate all its mess into the alsactl init db (patches have been sent to this mailing list, too). A nontrivial concern is that for some subset of the hard-coded (ick!) mixer controls being set in that script, there are no associated bug reports containing relevant hardware information (e.g., PCI SSID). Thus, migrating them over to the init db format is quite history-search-intensive. But, as I've stated formerly here and on pulseaudio-discuss, it's definitely deprecated (e.g., bug reports have been retitled to indicate that such-and-such an entry in the init db is needed. As I've stepped away from Ubuntu development due to $dayjob, the efforts need to be continued by others).
-Dan