Re: CD writing in future Linux try #2

[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

 



Albert Cahalan wrote:
On 1/31/06, David S. Miller <[email protected]> wrote:


Someone remind me why the whole world is a prisoner to Joerg's cd
burning program?

Anybody can write their own, and if Joerg is a pain to work with that
is a double extra incentive for this other implementation to be
written.

In fact I'm very surprised this hasn't happened already.


It has happened, many times, but sustaining such a project is
very difficult. The obstacles are numerous:

All the GUI apps parse cdrecord output. The output is somehow
even messier than the recent /proc/*/smaps abomination. It is
thus difficult to change or replace cdrecord. One of the major
GUI apps appears to be written by Joerg's real-life non-Internet
friend, who naturally refuses any patches to eliminate the need
for cdrecord.

Joerg is a Fraunhofer employee. That gives him connections to
many hardware companies. (and the RIAA, MPAA, Sony, Disney...)
One may wonder if this is both blessing and curse.

Forking means dealing with a giant pile of messy and ugly code.
The coding conventions are... interesting... and this code has
to run setuid. One had better be really careful making changes.
Most people are clueless about setuid code.

Starting fresh means rediscovering firmware bugs, of which there
are many. Things may be getting somewhat better though, with the
old pre-standard interfaces hopefully dying out. Getting the most
out of the hardware will require lots of device-specific code.

Joerg gets the hardware.

There are all sorts of funky formats. I've only ever heard of
mixed audio+data CDs for circa-1995 games and Sony spyware, but
maybe there are decent people who actually create these things.
In theory, somebody might be making multi-session CDs. Who knows?

Not just in theory, I get notes from people saying they use addir for backups, which is why I wrote it, because I change ~50MB/day and one CD will hold all the change. So addir is like growisofs with some additional bells and whistles I found useful, like taking a list of files changed taoday from stdin (find) and adding them to the end of the CD, preserving or renaming directory names, etc.

http://www.tmr.com/~public/source/addir if you want to see an example.

I used the mixed audio and data a few times, I'm sure there are folks who use it regularly. cdrecord is full function, and continues to support new vendors and models, work around firmware bugs etc. A real replacement is going to be a lot of ongoing work.

--
   -bill davidsen ([email protected])
"The secret to procrastination is to put things off until the
 last possible moment - but no longer"  -me
-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to [email protected]
More majordomo info at  http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at  http://www.tux.org/lkml/

[Index of Archives]     [Kernel Newbies]     [Netfilter]     [Bugtraq]     [Photo]     [Stuff]     [Gimp]     [Yosemite News]     [MIPS Linux]     [ARM Linux]     [Linux Security]     [Linux RAID]     [Video 4 Linux]     [Linux for the blind]     [Linux Resources]
  Powered by Linux