Unfortunately Gentoo seems to become more and more worse...
Not only that there seems to be an increasing number of arrogant developers who
just do their work wearing big fat blinkers and hound other devs out of Gentoo,
they also show a - gently said - uber-lazy attitude when it comes to kinda
difficult tasks such as maintaining the media-sound/alsa-driver package
in Gentoo. One of those lazy developers is
chainsaw a.k.a. Tony Vroon who wants to
discontinue this
package just because he is unwilling to maintain it. His "excuse" is of course,
that the package would be too hard to maintain and users should use in-kernel
alsa-drivers for replacement.
He refuses to accept the fact, that in-kernel
alsa-drivers are outdated even when they get released with the latest kernels
most of the time as not every new release of alsa-drivers is getting merged
into kernels. There are also people who still use 2.4.x kernels that don't have
any alsa-drivers in-kernel. Last but not least even the alsa guys recommend to
keep all alsa packages (driver, lib, utils, oss, tools, etc.) in sync with
each other to prevent breakage or strange behaviours.
It's sad to see Gentoo
becoming worse by the attitude of developers like chainsaw. This is again a
good example how a few people can change a real good thing like Gentoo more and
more into a mess...
Update!