Messages in this thread | | | Date | Thu, 02 Feb 2006 14:17:51 -0500 | From | Bill Davidsen <> | Subject | Re: CD writing in future Linux try #2 |
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Albert Cahalan wrote: > On 1/31/06, David S. Miller <davem@davemloft.net> 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 (davidsen@tmr.com) "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 majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
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