I'm wondering if anyone can give me any info on the merge schedule that ALSA and the kernel follow.

I've just (stupidly) picked up a cheapo SBLive card, which "discover" identifies as a "Creative Labs Soundblaster Audigy LS". Googling tells me that this is /not/ supported by the standard emu10k(?) driver, but only by the emu10k-audigyls(?) driver that is present in ALSA 1.0.6.

My questions are these:

What sort of timescale does it take to get the latest ALSA release merged with the kernel? (I'm not asking for hard-and-fast here, just an empirical estimate!)

Will there, theoretically, be a time when this card is supported by having (a) kernel 2.6.9+ (b) alsa-* in Debian sid and (c) nothing else installed? In other words, if my alsa packages in Debian are kept up to date, will the kernel "eventually" see this card after an update and work with no kernel patching, or is there something that up-to-date Debian alsa packages and an up-to-date kernel image will /always/ need adding to them?

I hope this post isn't as confusing as it looks to me. Let me know if you might have some information on this, but you're just not sure what I'm asking :-)

Cheers!
jc