[alsa-devel] How to package the smixer modules?

[Takashi Iwai]

On Wed, 09 Nov 2016 15:39:26 +0100,
Tanu Kaskinen wrote:
> 
> On Tue, 2016-11-08 at 15:39 +0100, Takashi Iwai wrote:
> > The simple mixer is another layer in ALSA mixer API, and actually it's
> > mandatory.  So, at least, sbase plugin should be provided always when
> > alsa-lib mixer API is used.  Other plugins are basically never used
> > practically.
> > 
> > It doesn't matter whether to package them separately or not.  The only
> > point is that sbase plugin should be available when alsa-lib mixer API
> > is used.
> 
> Thanks for the explanation! If the sbase plugin is essentially a
> mandatory accompaniment of libasound, I'll move it to the libasound
> package, and since I don't see much benefit in keeping the hda and ac97
> plugins in a separate package either, I'll move those too and get rid
> of the whole smixer plugin package.
> 
> Out of curiosity, in what situation are the hda and ac97 plugins used?
> You said that they are practically never used, but surely they have
> some purpose?

Actually, I was wrong.  Even sbase.so isn't needed for the normal
alsamixer / amixer operations.  This is a base shared object that is
needed for "basic" abstraction mode, but the normal mode (abstraction
"none") doesn't need it.

That said, the whole /usr/lib*/alsa-lib/smixer/* stuff can be removed
from your package as long as the normal mode is used.

There is an option -a to pass the abstraction level.  When you pass
"basic", the python module gets loaded.  It was supposed to handle the
card-specific abstraction parsed via python, but this seems currently
broken.  So it's maybe safer to disable as default...


Takashi