[SDL] SDL port to ALSA 1.0.14 and SALSA

[Ryan C. Gordon]

> Does SDL audio port to ALSA lib 1.0.14 and port to 
> salsa(http://ftp.suse.com/pub/people/tiwai/salsa-lib/) in the wish list 
> of SDL developers/users?
> I am asking becasue i doing a port to it and i was thinking  if it could 
> one day be merged into trunk.

I just looked at this briefly.

The SALSA docs mention that they are source-compatible with alsalib, but 
it looks like the current SDL ALSA code might be depending on a function 
that has changed in newer alsalib releases 
(snd_pcm_hw_params_get_channels, specifically).

Plus it crashes in _snd_pcm_hw_param_set_near() when I tried to work 
around the above issue.

We're currently targeting alsalib 0.9, probably because that was the 
latest when the code was first written, but there's no reason we can't 
move to a newer version.

I don't think we'll need a full "port" to salsalib, but if you have some 
reasonable fixes to make the current ALSA code coexist with it, I'll 
definitely merge them into Subversion (and if you do it soon, they can 
go into the 1.2.12 release).

Also, someone should tell the salsalib maintainer that installing to a 
default prefix of /usr overwrote my existing ALSA libraries on Ubuntu. 
/usr/local would have been more polite.

--ryan.