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cdrtools - a tale of an incompatible author
cdrtools - a tale of an incompatible author
Posted Aug 12, 2006 21:24 UTC (Sat) by erich (subscriber, #7127)Parent article: cdrtools - a tale of two licenses
Form all I've heard and read, Jörg Schilling seems to be hard to work with. A couple of factors play a role, he seems to be quite arrogant and ignorant about the work and preferences of others.
I'd be very happy if we would end up with an cdrtools-equivalent (in terms of functionality, not of obscurity) with no code of his involved.
For this it would be very helpful if other would join the existing efforts of making a "free" cdrecord, i.e. the libburn and dvdrecord projects.
It's not just Debian. SuSE had some serious trouble with Mr. Schilling, too. I think he put code into cdrtools once to nag users when they used SuSE.
That Debian is more active probably is a reason that the decisions are made by the developers who have to deal with Mr. Schilling, and not by the commercial interests of a company having to sell a linux distribution with working CD and DVD writing support. The recent move of e.g. Fedora and OpenSuSE to more community-developed distributions will make them care more about such things, too.
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cdrtools - a tale of an incompatible author
Posted Aug 12, 2006 21:34 UTC (Sat) by jsarets (subscriber, #39560) [Link]
Jörg Schilling, I'd like to introduce you to David Dawes. You two should get along quite famously.
cdrtools - a tale of an incompatible author
Posted Aug 13, 2006 7:06 UTC (Sun) by louie (subscriber, #3285) [Link]
The two of them could get together with Branden Robinson and JWZ and write some software together- it would be a blast! For those of you new to the general scene, if you want a good chuckle, go read the famous "choke on a bucket of cocks" post right now :)
cdrtools - a tale of an incompatible author
Posted Aug 14, 2006 8:35 UTC (Mon) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
Actually, jwz and David can at least listen to reason in most areas (jwz in pretty much all, as far as I can tell: he just has strong opinions and a quirky sense of humour).
Joerg lives in his own universe and is impervious to rational argument on every subject I've ever seen him discuss (if one can use that word with respect to Joerg: to me, 'discussion' implies at least the possibility of movement on both sides). He's right and everyone else is wrong, on every subject, no matter what, and that's it. The facts are not important and every possible debating trick is usable, no matter how unethical, in service of that.
cdrtools - a tale of an incompatible author
Posted Aug 14, 2006 12:03 UTC (Mon) by arafel (subscriber, #18557) [Link]
Joerg is one of those people where dpm's comment applies in full force. Thankfully, people with quite this level of obliviousness are comparatively rare...
You go right on thinking that. Don't let reality stop you. -- dpm
cdrtools - a tale of an incompatible author
Posted Aug 15, 2006 4:18 UTC (Tue) by kirkengaard (subscriber, #15022) [Link]
And, however off-the-wall or b0rken, whatever some UNIX does (other than Linux) is more important. Joerg has demonstrated a remarkable capacity to try to serve every UNIX alive simultaneously, and so when Linux does something perfectly sensible, but not bound by the logic of every other UNIX in existence, Joerg tells us we're wrong, and uses his code as a bludgeon.
cdrtools - a tale of an incompatible author
Posted Aug 15, 2006 9:07 UTC (Tue) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
For values of 'every other UNIX in existence' equal to 'Solaris and only Solaris', you're right. He tries to serve every other Unix in existence by a) writing an indirection layer to make them look like Solaris (which is fine), b) insisting that users use device-choice semantics appropriate only to old versions of Solaris (which is silly), and c) badgering everyone else to try to force them to be more like Solaris (which is annoying).
It's not as if cdrecord looks remotely like any other Solaris application in existence in command-line argument layout or in user interface. The whole thing is a triumph of NIH, from the, ahem, `unique' makefile system with its manifold annoyances through to the `unique' command line with *its* manifold annoyances (which make it amazingly hard to parse the output of from scripts: *another* way in which dvdrecord beats it).
cdrtools - a tale of an incompatible author
Posted Aug 18, 2006 13:32 UTC (Fri) by job (subscriber, #670) [Link]
His tar utility is lovely, my secret wish is that it ends up replacing GNU tar in a distant future, at least the features and file format compatibility.
cdrtools - a tale of an incompatible author
Posted Aug 13, 2006 9:35 UTC (Sun) by lamikr (subscriber, #2289) [Link]
It just seems that dvdrtools is not very active project.Latest commit I found seems to be commit number 26, made over 6 months ago...
http://www.arklinux.org/projects/dvdrtools/log/trunk/README
(Mention that we don't support DVD+R(W) (yet))
Mika
cdrtools - a tale of an incompatible author
Posted Aug 17, 2006 13:52 UTC (Thu) by kenmoffat (subscriber, #4807) [Link]
true, dvdrtools is not active at the moment, but it does work very well - you don't get the later code that defaults to burning as fast as the drive allows (so you need the old-style invocation) but it does build straightforwardly on architectures beyond x86 (e.g. x86_64 and ppc64) - no need to work around Mr Schilling's incomprehensible* build system.
* that is, incomprehensible to a mere mortal, he obviously understands his own plaything.