Month: August 2007

Short summary of the last months

Now, let me quickly write a second blog-post, as you haven’t read anything from me for a couple of months. In February I announced my extended outtime from Gentoo due to finishing my study. It’s almost over now – I just have to give a final presentation next week. After that I’m going to move as I have to leave the student hostel I lived in for a couple of years. It seems that I will move to Cologne (hey zypher, stkn, wschlich and all other devs in that area 😉 ). If you already want to meet me (and some other devs) in that area, come to FrOSCon in Sankt Augustin tomorrow (Saturday, August 25).

Two weeks ago I managed to attend the Chaos Communication Camp, although I announced to everyone that I won’t be there. It was fun to see the irritated faces of persons who thought they spotted a ghost 😀 And it was relaxing, as I submitted my diploma thesis just the same day I drove to the Camp. I had a look into the Gentoo village over there, but could not find any known person – beside GMsoft who hit me on a road somewhere on the campground.

At some days during my diploma thesis I felt the urge to receive quick motivation kicks by helping users or the PowerPC-team. So I had a run through all open ppc-bugs and managed to kick them down from around 80 to under 25. Unfortunately they rose to 93 now 🙁 Mostly stabilisation-requests, which are quite quick to resolve, especially with the help of gatt. opfer and I with the help of the author of gatt, Matthias, are working on an automated scripting for commiting and changing a bug after a package merged successfully. More will come after our own testing phase. Unfortunately I already packed my Pegasos for the move, so that I can’t help out with testing. Anyways, the ppc-team will survive.

Now to the bad news: I don’t have a job yet. All applications were declined, but everytime I was in the round of the last two candidates. But then the companies decided for the other one. It’s too bad that I didn’t specialised in the past and that I’m an all-rounder. It seems that companies don’t have a need for persons who can jump in nearly every technical position. Now I have to wait for answers to the other applications I wrote. Probably my run of luck ended with the end of my study…

Eight months later: Again the future of CD/DVD-recording

First, I have to correct one sentence in my previous entry about this topic. It read “non-free version of cdrtools”, which is not true. The current cdrtools are licensed under the CDDL, which is of course an Open Source license. But it is not compatible with the GNU GPL according to the list of GPL-Compatible Free Software Licenses.

But what changed within those more than eight months between the previous and this post? It seems that cdrkit died in May. There are still some random posts on the mailing-list, there was a minor bugfix-release with corrections in the man-page, but no real code-change.

On the other hand cdrtools made a big step forward and now supports unicode out of the box, ISO-files > 4GB (up to 8TB, think about DVD-9) and even Blu Ray!

I will try to keep current versions of both apps in portage, so that the user can decide which one to use. The only thing I’m not sure about is if I should change back the default virtual for cdrtools? Currently it’s pointing to cdrkit, so that any dependency will use that application. But as soon as a GUI supports Blu Ray I should change it back to cdrtools. Probably that will be around Christmas when the average Nerd finds such a Blu Ray burner under the Christmas tree 😉

Future of CD/DVD-recording

Some of you might have followed the long discussion about cdrtool‘s licensing. In the end some Debian-developers forked the last GPL-version of cdrtools and set up cdrkit.

The maintainers added a lot of patches for better CD- and DVD-recording on Linux-systems, and what I like most, for UTF-8 based files. This is a long-requested patch for cdrtools, which did not make it upstream. Now, after the licensing-issues are resolved, the original authors of the cdrtools-applications asked for renaming. In version 1.1.0 of cdrkit some names already changed:

  • cdrecord → wodim (Writes Optical Media)
  • mkisofs → genisoimage (Generate ISO IMAGEs)
  • cdda2wav → icedax (InCrEdible Audio eXtractor, although cdda2mp3, cdda2ogg and cdda2wav still exist)
  • readcd → readom (READ Optical Media)
  • rscsi → netscsid (NET SCSI Daemon)
  • libschily → librols (LIB Remains Of LibSchily)
  • libscg → libusal (LIB Unified/Universal Scsi Access Layer)

As there exists no (usable) library for CD/DVD-recording, all frontends (like k3b, brasero, graveman, xcdroast, etc.) use the cdrecord (and friends)-binary. As I don’t want to force users to use cdrkit, I will not patch every application to use the new names. The simple solution is to provide symlinks from the old to the new names. Fortunately the essential arguments are the same in both applications. I tested (and patched) a couple of applications with cdrkit and had a good result so far.

Currently we are working on stabelising the 1.0.0-version of cdrkit. The first step was to test and add the already existing virtual/cdrtools (this was from the time when cdrecord-prodvd existed) to all applications which depend on cdrtools. This progress can be considered as finished. But as cdrkit depends on >=dev-util/cmake-2.4.3, we have to stabilise this ebuild first. Watch Bug 155307 for the progress. This means that cdrkit will become stable around Christmas.

I will still maintain cdrtools in portage, but with lower priority. As we don’t have any stats from our users about their installed packages, I can’t tell if we could remove it some time in future.

Also note, that there exists growisofs for DVD-writing. This is a completely separated application from cdrtools or cdrkit. Some frontends (like k3b) make use of it.

Thanks to metalgod who hopped onto the cdrkit-train first and added the pre-release versions to portage!