Portage Alsa is ANCIENT!!!

[raid517]

Lol hi, I was wondering if anyone here is able to update alsa on the portage tree to a more recent version? The version of Alsa on the current portage tree 0.9.02 is positively old. I need the new version in order to get digital out working on my Via 8233 on board sound, as I do not have any of the old style analoge PC speakers. All I have is a digital optical cable leading to a 7.1 doby digital reciever. I am making the assumption that the included alsa version on portage is quite old as the latest stable version on the Alsa site is listed as 0.97 and some months ago when I used Red Hat 9.0 digital optical out worked flawlessly on this system, without any additional configuration from me. So it seems even Red Hat 9.0 - now itself soon to be superceded, had a more uptodate version of Alsa than is avaiable on portage.

I guess I could update manually, but that kind of defeats the purpose of portage for me and would involve a lot more work - and besides as I recall the last time i encountered this problem, portage kept trying to overwite my newly installed alsa version with the older, not much use one, which was a bit of a pain in the bum to try to prevent.

So how about it? Will we ever see any new versions of ala, or is the current one the only possible option?

Q