Hello all, 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. 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. 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. I'm not aware of a precedent of a package in the Fedora Extras repository depending on a package in an external repository but it doesn't sound like a good idea if it can be avoided. 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. I'm not sure if this would be the best solution or if there are issues that meant it wouldn't be possible but I would like to help in making it easier for Fedora to support these devices as getting them to work at the moment is frustrating(at least to me) and beyond the capability of what I would expect from the "average user". Thoughts and ideas welcome... Tim.
