There are 4 use flags that concern me: oss alsa esd arts.
[I suppose there are other use flags out there, like jack and maybe dmix in the future, but I'm not worried about those ATM.]
What I'd like to do is have programs that support arts (have an arts use flag) compile support for arts, but none of the others. Then, any that support esd but not arts (have an esd use flag, but no arts use flag) compile support for esd and no others. Then, alsa and finally oss (although I'll have oss apps use arts through the compatability layer.)
I may be missing something, but how do you expect +arts to work without +alsa (or +oss)? If an app has a +esd and not a +arts, then having +arts in your USE flags doesn't matter, because no app is going to compile support for something it doesn't have. If an app has +oss, but you only have alsa drivers in use by the system, all this does is allow alsa to /inform alsa that this program will use the compatibility layer (rather than direct alsa use). If you compile -alsa and you only have alsa drivers in use by the system, that program will have no sound.
About the only thing I can see this complicated hypothesis avoiding is having all forms of support being compiled for a single app (i.e., you don't want any app to ever be +esd, +arts, +oss and +alsa), but I see no reason why you would want to avoid this, unless you specifically were not going to have one of these elements on your system. But this does not seem to be the case, as you want programs that support arts to have arts, and programs that support esd to have esd.
So, since arts, esd, alsa and alsa OSS support are already on your system, why does it matter that individual programs do not have the broadest range of support possible? It's not like every app with such support is going to re-emerge and recompile arts if you add +arts and arts is already present on your system.
Is there a simple way to do this, or do I have to go through all my packages to set my use flags in package.use manually?
Well, I would say just use all of them and let it sort itself out, but then again, I don't get what you're trying to do here.
AFAICT, I have to have arts to get sounds from most KDE apps and I have to have esd to get sound from flash so I'm thinking my sound setup should be somthing like:
arts -> esd -> alsa
oss ---^
Arts doesn't "use" esd (they are two separate sound servers which perform parallel functions) so "arts => esd" is not reasonable. The situation is more like this
arts => alsa esd => alsa alsa => oss
Are you sure that flash won't play sounds if esd is not running? I don't have esd running atm, and I haven't noticed any problems with Flash in my browser (and my browser isn't even Konqueror, which I would have to believe should handle sound-producing content through arts). But then again I'm not in Gentoo atm, either. What USE flags was netscape-flash-plugin compiled with? Or the browser that you are using to display Flash?
Holly
Holly
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