[arch-general] change in mount behaviour?

[Heiko Baums]

Am Sat, 28 Jan 2012 15:09:30 +0100
schrieb Tom Gundersen <teg at jklm.no>:

> Have you tried after this fix was released:
> <http://git.alsa-project.org/?p=alsa-lib.git;a=commitdiff;h=d3906a93072171e5b5f4000d4a228af4eb8fa253>?

Like I've written in another e-mail in this thread:

And, no, artificially crippling a (semi-)professional audio card down
to stereo with a strange ALSA configuration is not a solution for this.
And, no, it's not ALSA's fault like Lennart Poettering says, it's
PulseAudio's fault.

This is what is done by this fix. But those (semi-)professional audio
cards with an ice1712 chip aren't SoundBlaster like stereo sound cards
for playing some games. They work completely different, because they
have several separate channels which can be mixed however you want (of
course to normal stereo, too, but not only). Look at the only working
mixer for this card, envy24control in alsa-tools (or
alsa-tools-ice1712 from AUR), to get a clue. It's sort of a clone of
the original mixer and patchbay of the Windows driver for these cards.
Or search for documentation of these cards.

The problem is, that Lennart Poettering and the other PulseAudio guys
don't know anything about these cards. There's also an upstream bug (I
don't have the URL to hand), which was indeed closed as fixed with a
reference to this commit. Since this is not a fix and not even a
workaround I reopened the bug report and never got an update of this
bug, yet.

So, no, as long as the PulseAudio developers don't know enough about
sound and audio and as long as they don't support every sound and audio
card in the way those cards are supposed to by the hardware developers
and the users, it's just crap, and definitely not a candidate for
being a standard.

ALSA can handle every sound and audio card including the ice1712 cards
perfectly out-of-the-box without such a strange configuration.

> Dunno. Depends on the bug. Point me at it and I'll fix it wherever it
> is.

I'm not using systemd and never will until Arch Linux switches
officially to it. But it was already announced that this will most
likely not happen. I guess there are good reasons for this decision.

> The different usecases of /media and /mnt are explained in the FHS
> link you provided.

I don't see any difference there. Optical media contain a filesystem
and harddisks contain filesystems. Both are usually mounted
temporarily. So what's the difference?

> Nope. We are working with the other distros to make things more
> uniform, not less. In my humble opinion doing this work within the
> framework of the FHS is not very effective. Coding by committee seldom
> works.

If this is really done this way it's OK. But somehow I still have
my doubts. But I'm open to conviction.

My impression recently was that there are a lot of people doing and
inventing a lot of things on their own which has almost nothing to do
with any Linux standards, particularly again Lennart Poettering, and
that some other distros just take Lennart's ideas without thinking
about it, while other distros don't do this, etc.

And you know what I still think of Lennart.

> The things that are agreed upon are being added to the next version of
> FHS, but I guess things are not done in the order you would prefer.

If this will indeed happen, then it's OK for me. Still I have some
doubts.

Heiko