Sigh, Suse 8.0 just moved fom 0.5 to 0.9 - the Alsa developers regard 0.9 as more stable and having less bugs than 0.5. Why spend all that time on an obsolete driver? OK, that is mostly the disappointment speaking that I still won't be able to run wine with Alsa.
the point is not whether 0.5 is technically better than 0.9 (or the other way around). The point is on the current installed base of ALSA drivers in the field, how many are 0.5 and how many are 0.9. Mandrake and Suse (at least) have been shipping 0.5 for more than one year, whereas 0.9 is brand new. It just means that 0.9 installed base is almost 0 (in percentage). So, spending time right now on 0.9 is not the top priority (at least for me). OTOH, since the OSS emulation in ALSA 0.5 is broken, the point is whether we fix it (using a pure ALSA 0.5 driver in Wine), or let users live with that (TG has disabled the HAL support in dsound just because of that and it's a PITA)
A+