[Fedora-music-list] Alsa tools and firmware

[Thorsten Leemhuis]

Am Dienstag, den 09.05.2006, 16:31 +1000 schrieb Tim Mayberry:

> It seems the alsa-tools package in fedora extras is crippled as I
> found out a little while ago
> https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=186858 and there
> is no alsa-firmware package in FE.

That partly my fault.

> This is a bit of a problem for people like myself who use audio
> devices that need firmware to be loaded into the device before it can
> be used. In the past I used the planet CCRMA alsa packages and more
> recently I built and installed the alsa-tools and alsa-firmware
> packages from source tarballs because at the time planet CCRMA didn't
> support FC5.

The old plan was to move alsa-firmware to livna. The current plan is to
solve the problems with alsa-firmware and ship what can be shipped.
Someone (Legal, FESCo) simply has to say what files from alsa-firmware
are okay for Extras, and what not. The last I heard was this:

----

> I maintained some alsa-firmware in the old fedora.us days. During the
> transition to Fedora Extras the package got "lost" -- it was unclear if
> the files in it were okay for the official Fedora Extras. See
> https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=143249#c3
> 
> We dropped it then and forwarded the issue to legal. It got lost or was
> forgotten, I can't remember. But I'd like to get this solved now that
> someone asked for a Extras package of alsa-firmware in bugzilla. 
> 
> So, where were the problems? Here is the main one:
> 
> > $ file ./mixartloader/miXart8.elf 
> > ./mixartloader/miXart8.elf: ELF 32-bit MSB executable, PowerPC or cisco 4500, version 1 (SYSV), statically linked, not stripped

That is a pretty big problem.

Some of this is probably ok for FE, but only those bits which are not
libraries or binaries.

----

I got distracted at that point -- so there is no real list what's oky
for Extras and what not.

> Although I greatly appreciate the work of Fernando and others at
> CCRMA, I don't really like the idea of replacing the whole alsa stack
> when as far as I'm aware it isn't really necessary. I believe the
> alsa-firmware package is not available in FE because of policy,
> assuming that is still the case it would mean that the alsa-firmware
> package would need to be hosted in an external repository.

Livna is willing to help here for those bits that can't be in Extras.

> I'm not aware of a precedent of a package in the Fedora Extras
> repository depending on a package in an external repository  [...]

Not possible.

>  In this case it
> can by removing the crippled alsa-tools package from Fedora Extras and
> keeping it an external repository along with the alsa-firmware
> package.

We should split alsa-firmware -- the "mostly free" parts should land in
Extras, the others in Livna. Are you interested in doing this. I simply
have no time for it ATM, never really was interested this alsa-firmware
stuff and I don't even have hardware to test. Are you interested in
driving this forward? You can of course count on my help.

CU
thl