Hey guys, I am not sure if I should be forwarding this to you or to kernel.org, but since it is gentoo-sources I am dealing with, I figured this might be the appropriate way to go. Either way, I have recently been trying to setup my sound to work in linux, and unfortunately due to the way the listing is laid out I think I have selected the wrong driver for a simple error. The driver listing under PCI Sound devices under ALSA is not listed alphabetically. I do not know what other sections are not listed alphabetically, but this surely is a pain. I propose that all the listings be done alphabetically, perhaps not the main menu, but some sort of order. It certainly helps going through driver listings alphabetically, as I found having two sections for intel drivers for sound to be rather irritating and has caused me to recompile my kernel now a third time (to be done). Either way, I would appreciate it if the listings were arranged alphabetically in the menu for selecting what to be compiled into the kernel. As I said before, I am not certain if this is your department, if it is not, please let me know who to mention this to and I gladly will. Either way, much appreciated help if you can provide. :)
Tristan, This is something that has to be decided upstream (the kernel devs). The Gentoo Kernel devs are generally not in the business of making changes like this; in fact, it's the g.o kernel dev's policy that patches not be created that deviate largely from the main kernel tree. There's a good explanation as to why the g.o kernel devs don't deviate from the mainline kernel here: http://dev.gentoo.org/~dsd/genpatches/faq.htm "Q. Will you apply [some kernel patch]? If it's a serious and non-intrusive bugfix that has been accepted into the upstream development kernel, then usually yes (please open a bug). Otherwise, generally the answer is no - instead of getting new features added to our kernel, we'd prefer you to contact the authors of that code and get them to finish off their work and submit it to the mainline kernel so that everyone can benefit." Hope this helps! :)
Indeed, this is not something for Gentoo to change. http://lkml.org/ http://bugzilla.kernel.org/
