[Debburn-devel] Suggestions

[Albert Cahalan]

On 9/12/06, Nathanael Nerode <neroden at fastmail.fm> wrote:
> (1) Merge changes made in dvdrtools.  dvdrtools forked from an even
> earlier version of cdrtools, and all the additions are GPLv2-or-later.
>
> (dvdrtools is in non-free solely because of the libscg "You may not" lines, which
> are *also* present in cdrkit.  Um.... there's some small problem there.)

We need to make a choice right now:

a. delete those lines (Joerg#1 said the code was GPL anyway)
b. go back to a much older version

> (2) Strip out all the cruft related to support for Linux kernel interfaces
> other than the ones in Linux 2.6.

Yes, definitely.

> (3) Drop support for obscure operating systems, starting with the VMS support
> files.  (All of those ".com" files are VMS build files -- there's no way those
> are going to stay maintained, so remove them.)  I think several of the
> proprietary Unices are clearly not worth supporting either.  You might want to
> just go all-Linux (or Linux + *BSD); do you really care about non-free OS support?

Based on SCSI interface and other considerations,
from most to least sane:

a. Linux
b. OpenBSD, MacOS, Solaris, HP-UX, AIX, IRIX
c. FreeBSD, Windows (for very different reasons)
d. all other OSes as far as I can tell

> From the TODO for dvdrtools:
> "- Better support for writing directly to device files, without having
>    to create fake SCSI bus mappings"
>
> This will mean that Solaris support would require a translation layer, but that
> can be provided as soon as a Solaris user cares.  :-)

No, Joerg#1 lied. Solaris works fine.

We should decide how best to generate fake SCSI bus
mappings though, because we still need them to satisfy
the many crufty cdrecord wrapper programs and scripts.

The current mapping is evil. It pretends to be "real", but
is not. Better ideas include:

a. (st_mode>>12),major(st_rdev),minor(st_rdev)
b. sequential, 0 to 999 shown as 0,0,0 to 9,9,9
c. for Windows drives: 0,0,tolower(drive)-'a'
d. for Windows when no drive letter: 1,0,something
e. a hash of the info supplied by the drive itself
f. index into the /etc/whatever file

> (6) Rather than using the built-in hacked-up libparanoia, dynamically link to the
> standard cdparanoia.

This tool doesn't belong here at all.

> (7) Move the man pages to their own subdirectories instead of leaving them scattered
> amidst the source code.

No, it's better to keep them with the source code
that they go with.

> (8) Move all the old cdrecord/cdrtools changelogs, NEWS files, announcements, etc. to
> one "old changelog" directory.  (a.k.a: get them out of the way)

I suppose.

> (9) Break out mkisofs into an independent package; sever the links with
> wodim/cdrecord/etc.  mkisofs shouldn't be messing around with SCSI, so it has
> no excuse for using libscg, scsi_cdr.c, or modes.c (or indeed several of the other
> files it uses).

Damn right.