The alsa-* ebuilds are hideously outdated. 0.9.12 was released 2002-02-26.
I agree, the .5 packages are useless with newer boards (nForce) and the .9 series are at a release candidate and very stable.
The alsa-0.9.x packages are in portage, they're just masked with this lame comment that "new alsa would take too long to compile". Criminy. Everything in Gentoo takes to long to compile. They should be unmasked, instead of me having to do it myslef.
I'll take this one if no-one minds.
I committed the ebuilds for 0.9.0rc1 (the latest alsa). They are still masked in /usr/portage/profiles/package.mask, but we'll unmask them once they undergo a few day's worth of testing. The packages are alsa-driver, alsa-lib, alsa-oss, alsa-utils and alsa-tools. Could you guys please test them and let us know if they work for you? If there are any issues, please open new bug reports about them (you can assign them to me straight away). Thanks.