Am I the only one who finds this sort of weather variation weird?

(Source: NOAA)

This is a positive event which happened to me recently in a Debian bug report, with regard to audio troubles. There are several positives, and I owe some gratitude to several people in the Debian (and ALSA) community, so I thought a blog post would be a good idea. It also shows the advantage in filing a well-written installation report to the Debian project. Here is the description of events.

• I was installing Debian on a HP notebook intended for someone else. As always, almost everything worked out of the box, except sound, which kept hanging and crashing. I had to search for quite a while, before I found an ALSA workaround which was needed for this card (addition of an enable_msi option to the ALSA driver options). Being a good Debian citizen, I decided to file an installation-reports bug commending the Debian installer team (Christian Perrier has responded to quite a few of my reports; kudos to him), and letting them know of the ALSA bug.
• Christian Perrier thanked me for the report, and reassigned the bug to the alsa-driver package for further probing.
• Elimar Riesebieter promptly responded, and he tagged my bug as "wontfix". He told me how to get the workaround done properly, and pointed me to some documentation.
• I thanked him for his directions, but ranted that it upset me that the Debian ALSA maintainers didn't allow for the possibility of per card workarounds. I claimed that "Joe Users" won't care to read cryptic documents explaining the intricacies of snd-hda-intel, and they'll just install Debian Squeeze, and say "Debian didn't play my audio.", thus resulting in negative publicity. It was a rant, but I firmly believed that it wasn't unreasonable.
• Elimar patiently pointed out that it was not technically feasible for the ALSA maintainers to maintain a quirk-workaround method for every weird sound card they might come across. Moreover, he refused to take responsibility for a flaw which was actually in the chipset and not in the ALSA drivers. That sounded reasonable to me.
• However, Elimar was kind enough to forward this request to the ALSA developers' list, and ask them the right way to work around the problems posed by problematic sound cards.
• Takeshi Iwai and Daniel Chen promptly responded with proper instructions on how to work around the error. They said that it was ALSA's responsibility to handle these workarounds, so a patch should be provided to ALSA upstream. Moreover, Daniel Chen even produced the patch to handle this quirk.
• The patch is pushed upstream, and Elimar has added it to the Debian version, and has requested an upload, which should happen soon.

This was an extremely positive experience. While I agree that the number of people who would encounter this quirk may not be large, it makes me happy that at least some users who use Linux on this hardware will not have to face this issue anymore, irrespective of which distribution they use, as long as it carries an up-to-date ALSA.

I wanted to share this experience with you, since this is a glowing example of how the "community" approach works perfectly for FOSS. Thanks to Elimar, for being a concerned maintainer, and to the ALSA upstream developers who were proactive in producing a fix to this problem. And, most of all, thanks to me, for filing an installation report; these things really work! (OK, tongue-in-cheek. But I did take the effort of filing it, so I deserve the credit, don't I?) :-)

So, have you filed an installation report for your Debian installation? If not, I urge you to do so; I sincerely believe that filing good bugs and being proactive in helping developers zero in on the problem and fix is an important contribution to free software which any user can do. And the best way to start this process in Debian, is with an installation-report. :-)

OK, that earlier test post was not supposed to be displayed there. Apologies...

This blog post is to reach out to someone who had mailed me for keysigning. Unfortunately, that mail got marked as spam, and my wonderfully broken mail workflow resulted in me erasing that message, without bothering to store a copy or even noting the name of that person. Before someone points a finger at me, please remember, no system is foolproof; if you make better systems, they'll just start making better fools, and it applies well to me.

So, if you are reading this and need keysigning in Austin, TX, USA, please do mail me again; I promise to be more careful this time. Thanks. And Hello Planet Debian!