Re: CD writing in future Linux try #2

[Bill Davidsen <davidsen@tmr.com>]

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