cdrtools - a tale of two licenses [LWN.net]

cdrtools - a tale of two licenses

Posted Aug 12, 2006 21:53 UTC (Sat) by jwb (subscriber, #15467)
Parent article: cdrtools - a tale of two licenses

cdrecord also has the distiction of being among the worst programs ever written. I'd be happy to rid my life of that over-verbose, stderr-spamming, malfunctioning trash forever. Thanks to Mr. Schilling for providing the motivation for the community to replace his third-rate product at long last.

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cdrtools - a tale of two licenses

Posted Aug 12, 2006 23:12 UTC (Sat) by liljencrantz (subscriber, #28458) [Link]

While Shilling is obvioulsy a rather difficult character with some rather annoying ideas about having everything his way, saying that cdrecord is garbage is rather unfair. If cdrecord truly was garbage, then one of the many attempts to replace it over the years would have won by now. Fact of the matter is that in spite of Jörg, cdrecord has remained _the_ cd recording program for most Unices for something like a decade. It is obviously a _lot_ harder to write a cd recording utility than you'd belive. My understanding is that nearly every new type of recorder is incompatible with all previous recorders. It's basically your average maintainership nightmare. Kind of like Ide was before SATA.

cdrtools - a tale of two licenses

Posted Aug 13, 2006 0:07 UTC (Sun) by Zomb (subscriber, #23391) [Link]

From cdrtool's README:

It seems that all drives that have been initially released in 1999
or later are MMC compliant. If a recent drive does not work with
cdrecord, you most likely found a firmware bug in this drive.
Contact your drive vendor in this case.

So there have something close to a stable interface since... seven years? I cannot remember when I sold or threw away the last CD recorder from the time before, sorry.

cdrtools - a tale of two licenses

Posted Sep 5, 2006 7:58 UTC (Tue) by lacostej (subscriber, #2760) [Link]

I don't get it. Has anyone heard of regression testing ?

For a package like cdrecord there should be a full functional test suite simulating the various recorders and their strange/buggy behavior.

With that in place, maintaining it would be much easier than the way it is now.

cdrtools - a tale of two licenses

Posted Aug 14, 2006 8:37 UTC (Mon) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

To give it its due the code is substantially more readable than that of, say, procmail/formail.