Ubuntu 8.04 LTS server and desktop releases

I have a written a few ALSA applications in my time. Nothing serious, though. While I hold no
love for ALSA, I also do not appreciate the pulseaudio developers' apparent attitude that
everything not using their shit is legacy. (A comment to this effect is written on the
pulseaudio bug page at launchpad.) Maybe if they win out in the game of popularity they are
right, eventually.

I configured pulseaudio for sound playback on my desktop box with SB Live! and digital audio
link. It was a painful experience. After I toggled the option on in the gnome-sound-properties
dialog (which talks about ESound), it started PA. Then I forced the default pcm & ctl to
pulseaudio through .asoundrc, but got no sound. Applications were playing happily, so I
suspected a routing mishap.

The problem here was that the default alsa sink is the analog output sink, and there is no
toggle to switch digital output on instead. Missing an option like this is probably acceptable
for software with 0.x version number, I guess. I'd hazard that pulseaudio guys would see less
migration resistance if they didn't configure "front:0" as the output device (which should be
explicitly the 2 analog sound channels of a N-channel setup) but used "hw:0" instead, because
that would work the same way as ALSA does per default.

Yet another nail in this coffin. *sigh*