cdrkit: Debian's fork of cdrtools [LWN.net]

From:		Joerg Jaspert <joerg-AT-ganneff.de>
To:		debian-devel-announce-AT-lists.debian.org
Subject:		cdrkit (fork of cdrtools) uploaded to Debian, please test
Date:		Mon, 04 Sep 2006 00:16:41 +0200

Hi

we, the Debian maintainers of cdrtools, the cdrecord/mkisofs/cdda2wav
program suite, just uploaded cdrkit into the Debian archive. It will hit
your unstable box with the next run of dinstall, please help us and test
it.

This is a fork of the well-known cdrtools suite provided by Jörg
Schilling. It will replace his cdrtools package in Debian (cdrtools will
be removed a day later). The tarball for this release
can be found on http://debburn.alioth.debian.org/ or on your friendly
debian mirror after the next archive run.


Now we need your help to be sure we release a working version with etch.

If you are a user:

 - test it, with whatever you have to burn. Report anything broken which
   is not the fault of your hardware :)


If you are a maintainer of a program depending on cdrecord/mkisofs/cdda2wav:

 - change the dependency from cdrecord to wodim and change your program
   to call wodim, not cdrecord
 - test your program if it continues to work with the changes. In theory
   it should, but we all know Master Murphy just too well.



Now, for the background on why we took the decision to fork cdrtools:

Forking cdrtools as cdrkit
--------------------------


So, why the fork? CD/DVD burning is a complicated business that needs a
lot of knowledge, so forking such a big collection isn't a step to be
taken lightly. It requires a lot of development effort that could be put to
better use elsewhere.

In the past, we, the Debian maintainers of cdrtools, had a good and
mutually cooperative relationship with Jörg Schilling.  He even
commented on Debian bug reports, which is one of the best things an
upstream maintainer can do.  Naturally, there were occasionally
disagreements, but this is normal.


Unfortunately Sun then developed the CDDL[1] and Jörg Schilling
released parts of recent versions of cdrtools under this license.
The CDDL is incompatible with the GPL.  The FSF itself says that this
is the case as do people who helped draft the CDDL. One current and
one former Sun employee visited the annual Debian conference in Mexico
in 2006. Danese Cooper clearly stated there that the CDDL was
intentionally modelled on the MPL in order to make it GPL-
incompatible. For everyone who wants to hear this first-hand, we have
video from that talk available at [2].

You can read the FSF position about the CDDL at [3]. The thread behind
[4] contains statements on the issue made by Debian people; for more
context also see the other mails in that thread.
In short -  the CDDL has extra restrictions, which the GPL does not
allow.  Jörg has a different opinion about this and has repeatedly
stated that the CDDL is not incompatible, interpreting a facial
expression in the above-mentioned video, calling us liars and generally
appearing unwilling to consider our concerns (he never replied to the
parts where we explained why it is incompatible). As he has basically
ignored what we have said, we have no choice but to fork. While the CDDL
*may* be a free license, we never questioned if it is free or not, as it
is not our place to decide this as the Debian cdrtools
maintainers. However, having been approved by OSI doesn't mean it's ok
for any usage, as Jörg unfortunately seems to assume. There are several
OSI-approved licenses that are GPL-incompatible and CDDL is one of
them. That is and always was our point.


For our fork we used the last GPL-licensed version of the program code
and killed the incompatibly licensed build system. It is now replaced by
a cmake system, and the whole source we distribute should be free of
other incompatibilities, as to the best of our current knowledge.


Anyone who wants to help with this fork, particularly developers of
other distributions, is welcome to join our efforts. You can contact us
on IRC, server irc.oftc.net, channel #debburn, or via mail at
debburn-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org. Our svn repository is
http://svn.debian.org/wsvn/debburn.


[1] http://www.opensource.org/licenses/cddl1.php
[2]
http://meetings-archive.debian.net/pub/debian-meetings/20...
[3] http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html
[4] http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2006/08/msg00552.html

-- 
bye Joerg
<helix> doogie: you have an interesting definition for 'interact with
people' that means 'make them want to jump off cliffs'

(Log in to post comments)

cdrkit: Debian's fork of cdrtools

Posted Sep 4, 2006 18:27 UTC (Mon) by richo123 (guest, #24309) [Link]

Could not agree more! I have had a lot of problems with cd burning in Ubuntu and one was never sure because of Schilling's inpenetrable thicket where exactly the problem lay. His rants against linux scsi support used to really get on my nerves: Basic position was: use a proper unix like Sun or regress to a 2.4 kernel. Thanks (NOT) for the constructive input Herr Schilling! Time for a cleanout!

cdrkit: Debian's fork of cdrtools

Posted Sep 4, 2006 20:03 UTC (Mon) by erich (subscriber, #7127) [Link]

Why would you change the software? Change the user!

Instead of forking cdrecord, we could just fork the users!

cdrkit: Debian's fork of cdrtools

Posted Sep 14, 2006 18:25 UTC (Thu) by dvdeug (subscriber, #10998) [Link]

Users have a natural tendency to fork. Unfortunately, there seems to be some trouble getting the necessary pair of developers with the right attributes together to create and support the fork, and it take a lot of time and a lot of money to get a successful fork that doesn't depend on the initial pair of developers.

cdrkit: Debian's fork of cdrtools

Posted Sep 4, 2006 23:02 UTC (Mon) by moxfyre (subscriber, #13847) [Link]

I've never bothered to learn autotools fully since it's so complicated, and I can mostly just edit existing files to get what I want.

How steep is the learning curve on cmake? Can I learn the basics in an hour or two?

cdrkit: Debian's fork of cdrtools

Posted Sep 5, 2006 1:38 UTC (Tue) by lovelace (subscriber, #278) [Link]

Can I learn the basics in an hour or two?

Yes, absolutely. There was an article in Linux Magazine recently (disclaimer, free registration apparently required, and I'm the author of the article) about how to use CMake as well one here at LWN too. It's very simple to get started using it.

CMake

Posted Sep 5, 2006 2:14 UTC (Tue) by ringerc (guest, #3071) [Link]

And rightly so - it's great. I work on a project that presently supports CMake and autohell in parallel (we're dropping autohell as soon as current CMake unstable gets a stable release) and the relative ease of maintainance is significant. Whenever we want to change anything significant or add any feature to the build system it goes from significant to amazing - CMake rocks.

cdrkit: Debian's fork of cdrtools

Posted Sep 5, 2006 6:32 UTC (Tue) by asamardzic (subscriber, #27161) [Link]

After completing porting several small- and medium-scale projects from auto-tools to cmake, I can only confirm that (in my experience) cmake rocks indeed. Simple and consistent language made it possible for me to easily write feature testing macros, I was never able to figure out how to properly accomplish this with autoconf. The only slight problem is lack of complete documentation, I guess for projects with complicated setups one would have to order "Mastering CMake" book to get most from the tool. But this seems like fair game to me (mine copy of book is on its way), and on the other side cmake developers (and users too) are *very* responsive on cmake mailing list, so for lots of questions one could get the clarification this way.

Why not dvdrtools?

Posted Sep 5, 2006 7:47 UTC (Tue) by Zomb (subscriber, #23391) [Link]

Because dvdrtools took off from an older version and has not received many updates/fixes since then but got some significant modifications to port it away from "Schilling-style". Previous Debian package already had dozens of fixes and extensions (many shared with other distros, after all), it would have been the hell porting them to dvdrtools and keeping the quality. Especially in the expected time period, Debian Stable has to be released by the end of the year.

So it was finally the better compromise.

And then there are good and active alternatives which are going to replace cdrtools in the (mid-term) future: libburn/libisofs based apps, libcdio seems quite usefull as well and there is http://littlesvr.ca/isomaster/ which also looks promising.

Why not dvdrtools?

Posted Sep 7, 2006 10:46 UTC (Thu) by cortana (subscriber, #24596) [Link]

Furthermore, dvdrtools forked from a version of cdrecord that was available under the GPL with the additional restriction that you may not alter or remove the FUD about Linux printed when cdrecord starts up. Debian currently have dvdrtools in non-free... I would have thought that this additional restriction makes the entire lot non-distributable, however.

wodim?

Posted Sep 11, 2006 7:35 UTC (Mon) by xoddam (subscriber, #2322) [Link]

It could be Word of Deliverance Insititutional Ministries, Inc.

Or, just maybe, it's Write Optical Disc IMage (a guess...)

wodim?

Posted Sep 12, 2006 19:30 UTC (Tue) by jimparis (subscriber, #38647) [Link]

Frequently Asked Questions about cdrkit
=======================================

Q: What does "wodim" stand for?
A: It is not a forest troll and not a winner of the inpronounceability
contest. It was simply the next alternative to wom (Writes Optical Media)
which was unfortunately already used by other software products.