The future of mkisofs

[Joerg Schilling-3]

mkisofs is a program that has been originally writen in 1993 by Eric Youngdale
and that has been extended by many people.

In 1997, after Eric Youngdale mostly stopped working on mkisofs, I added
mkisofs to the cdrecord source tree and started working on bugs and important
extensions.

After 2 years (in 1999) Eric Youngdale transferred the complete code reporitory
to me.

At that time, several people helped to enhance mkisofs. The most active one was
James Pearson - he is unfortunately no longer reachable since he became a father
years ago. Since that time, more than 5 years ago, I am the main mkisofs
maintainer.


Being now able to decide myself in mkisofs since 1999, I spend half a year only
with bug fixes and code restructuring to make the code prepared for the
future.... Now more than 8 years later, mkisofs has a lot more features than in
1999 and needs another code lifting.

As mkisofs is very powerful and supports many OS and filesystem-hybrids, it has
become a de-facto standard for creating ISO-9660 based filesystem images.

We are currently a short time before the next "stable" release of cdrtools and
I am planning to start a bigger code clean up after that time. The current plan
is to do it the following way:

- cdrtools-xxx.zzz-final (the next "stable" release) will be the last
        release that includes all features that are currently in mkisofs.
        People who need these features (e.g. because they own old hardware)
        need to keel the version of mkisofs that is included in the next stable
        version of cdrtools.

- The ability to create "Apple-Hybrid" filesystem images causes problems
        since many years already because the "Apple HFS" filesystem type does
        not support files > 2 GB and includes other limitations.

        - Support for this old filesystem is only needed for owners of
                Mac OS 9 systems and for people who like to boot Apple PPC
                based systems. These Apple PPC based systems are out of
                production since 3 years already.

        - Recent Apple systems boot using El-Torito extensions and
                understand UDF + Apple extensions. Both is supported in mkisofs
                since a while.

        It seems that support for "Apple HFS" is no longer needed in mkisofs
        and removing the support could help to clean up the code.

        I am planning to remove the "Apple-Hybrid" support with the developer
        versions for cdrtools that follow the next stable release of cdrtools.

People who believe that this change would cause problems are called to explain
their arguments. Please comment.

Jörg

--
 EMail:joerg@... (home) Jörg Schilling D-13353 Berlin
       js@...                (uni)  
       schilling@...     (work) Blog: http://schily.blogspot.com/
 URL:  http://cdrecord.berlios.de/old/private/ ftp://ftp.berlios.de/pub/schily
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[Joerg Schilling-3]

Bill Davidsen <davidsen@...> wrote:

> I happily offer the suggestion that since the program has not been
> limited to ISO9660 images for years, the name implies limitations which
> don't apply, and since you can create images for most common optical
> media, that a name like "mkoptimage" would be more correct as well as
> preventing confusion.

mkisofs is a well known program name and I cannot see that your proposal for a
name change could help to reduce confusion for users.

The probably biggest help for _new_ users was to list only the "most important"
options in case of a usage error:

Most important Options:
        -posix-H                Follow sylinks encountered on command line
        -posix-L                Follow all symlinks
        -posix-P                Do not follow symlinks (default)
        -o FILE, -output FILE   Set output file name
        -R, -rock               Generate Rock Ridge directory information
        -r, -rational-rock      Generate rationalized Rock Ridge directory info
        -J, -joliet             Generate Joliet directory information
        -print-size             Print estimated filesystem size and exit
        -UDF                    Generate UDF file system
        -dvd-video              Generate DVD-Video compliant UDF file system
        -iso-level LEVEL        Set ISO9660 level (1..3) or 4 for ISO9660 v 2
        -V ID, -volid ID        Set Volume ID
        -graft-points           Allow to use graft points for filenames
        -M FILE, -prev-session FILE     Set path to previous session to merge

to lead people to the right options.

Jörg

--
 EMail:joerg@... (home) Jörg Schilling D-13353 Berlin
       js@...                (uni)  
       schilling@...     (work) Blog: http://schily.blogspot.com/
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[Joerg Schilling-3]

Bill Davidsen <davidsen@...> wrote:

> > mkisofs is a well known program name and I cannot see that your proposal for a
> > name change could help to reduce confusion for users.
> >
> >  
> Wow, think about that! You have to tell people many times a month that
> the program called cdrecord in many distributions is really "wodin" and
> works differently than your original cdrecord. Do you really want to be
> bothered by having questions about *three* versions of mkisofs, the
> current one in a38, the old one shipped with some distributions, and
> your new cleaned up version? It sounds like a waste of your time to me!

I don't see three versions of mkisofs as I know from several "professional"
users of mkisofs that they don't use the hsfs feature.

... and the main difference I see between mkisofs and the clone from "cdrkit"
is the bugs that are present in the clone but not in the original.

Jörg

--
 EMail:joerg@... (home) Jörg Schilling D-13353 Berlin
       js@...                (uni)  
       schilling@...     (work) Blog: http://schily.blogspot.com/
 URL:  http://cdrecord.berlios.de/old/private/ ftp://ftp.berlios.de/pub/schily
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