Description
For years, we have been developing and using our own CD image creation tool "cdmake". I propose switching to the Open-Source "mkisofs" tool (part of the cdrtools package from https://sourceforge.net/projects/cdrtools/) for the following reasons:
- mkisofs is the standard tool used for decades by every Linux distribution. Even Windows-specific tools like PE Builder used it to build a WinXP bootable from CD. So we can consider it portable and mature.
- cdmake is hardly maintained these days.
- cdmake only has basic ISO level support and limited Joliet support (see comments in code, e.g. no validation of generated filenames). Mkisofs provides all ISO9660 levels - even ISO9660:1999 which makes the standard a viable alternative to proprietary MS Joliet format.
- cdmake doesn't support UDF, mkisofs does. Given that cdmake is mostly unmaintained, I don't expect UDF support anytime soon.
- Given the maturity of mkisofs, I don't expect bugs like
CORE-11110. The referenced SVN revisions show that this bug apparently exists for a decade now. - Feature requests like CORE-9266 exist at least as a patch for mkisofs (Google: mkisofs duplicates-once).
- Given that discs are slowly being phased out, I don't expect the interest in cdmake to grow.
I usually see the benefits of having our own tools as we can extend them to our needs. However, a CD image creation tool only needs to follow public standards, and it needs to do that exactly! Therefore, I consider the de-facto reference implementation better than anything else.
Comments welcome!
Attachments
Issue Links
- relates to
-
CORE-12513 CD image: ISO-9660 filenames longer than 31
- Resolved