[alsa-devel] [alsa-utils] alsaucm should come with a man page

[Antonio Ospite]

Hi,

I used alsaucm to test mixer use cases for an Intel Baytrail tablet, I
wanted to use bare alsa before bringing pulseaudio in, and it took some
time to get my head around it.

The output from the "alsaucm --help" is too terse, I had to look at the
alsa-lib code[1] to see the possible IDENTIFIERs, and even then it was
not clear to me that some operations, like for instance "list _devices",
can only work after setting a _verb in the same _execution_, for
instance this sequence doesn't work:

# alsaucm -c bytcr-rt5640 set _verb HiFi
# alsaucm -c bytcr-rt5640 list _devices

But this command does:
  
# alsaucm -c bytcr-rt5640 -b - <<EOM
set _verb HiFi
list _devces
EOM

Now that I know something more it makes sense: UCM just operates on
mixer settings, it does not have its own external state.

However, my point is that a man page explaining these things can make
the life easier to new users.

It would be better if alsa/UCM developers wrote the man page, but if no
one steps up I guess I could draft a first version myself.

Thanks,
   Antonio

[1]
http://git.alsa-project.org/?p=alsa-lib.git;a=blob;f=include/use-case.h

-- 
Antonio Ospite
http://ao2.it

A: Because it messes up the order in which people normally read text.
   See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posting_style
Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing?