Lars Weiler

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!