Comment 79 for bug 579300

Application affected:

4. MythTV (with analogue tv cards)

The above is a killer application, not only meaning that, quoting wikipedia, it is a "computer program that is so necessary or desirable that it proves the core value of some larger technology", but also meaning that made my wife a killer when it stopped working.

Maybe the alsa support for ALSA is present in v 0.24 as per http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/Release_Notes_-_0.24, I've not had the opportunity of testing it since v 0.23 is shipped with maverick. We could file bugs for every not working application but that's not the point since they are not, strictly speaking, broken!

The points are that:
1) ALSA OSS emulation removal caused many documented show-stopper issues
2) ALSA OSS emulation may be obsolete, but still is not deprecated in the kernel
3) ALSA OSS emulation removal can eventually bring arguable advantages (mutiopen?), which are yet to be proved, in an hypothetic future
4) ALSA OSS emulation could simply had been disabled by default, still no reason to ditch it so suddenly had been shown
5) ALSA OSS emulation seems to be still present in other mainstream distro

Disabling it by default would have been more than enough to strongly promote evolution, this harsh removal is overkill.
It just makes AboveAverage Joe downgrade or devolve his weekend spare time to study "custom kernel compiling for dummies".
Average Joe probably would end up saying "ubuntu just doesn't work".

One thing is encouraging progress, another is deliberately sabotage OSS to make people complain to application developers to switch to ALSA (applicable only where applications are open and mantained).

SOLUTION: re-enable it in the official kernel, blacklist its modules by default.