[Libburn] roadmap/wishlist

[Derek Foreman]

On Thu, 7 Oct 2004, Steven Van Impe wrote:

> hi all,
>
> is there a roadmap/wishlist available for libburn (current to 1.0
> perhaps) ? I will need to discuss with my thesis promotor what exactly I
> can study & implement during the next academic year, so something like a
> roadmap might come in hand.

There's no official roadmap, but I've got bits and pieces of one in my 
head.

For libburn 0.3, I want to integrate Stephane's speed-list patch in an 
exportable way, and I want TAO finished up.

If possible, I'd like to see a resolution to what appears to be a bug in 
libisofs's burn source functions that prevents on the fly creation of ISO 
images.

For libburn 0.4, I'd like to be able to use HAL for selecting drives 
instead of the fairly hackish stuff we have right now.

At some point I want multi session support (the framework is mostly in 
place, this probably isn't as big as it sounds, it might need a couple of 
new mmc commands)

DVD burning would be nice.  I now have a DVD burner, so I can test/write 
code for that.  But I've not looked into the details at all.

Ripping CDs is on my wishlist too, but as I currently have a job that 
sends me to the USA from time to time, I'm not sure it's a good idea for 
me to write anything that could be used for cracking copy protection. 
There's a little bit of ripping code already in the tree, but it's badly 
bitrotted.

I'd also like to look into providing a "virtual drive" capability somehow, 
to allow linux to mount not just iso images, but the various other cd 
formats around.  Whether this is done through some sort of kernel 
interface, or just in a way that things like nautilus can access it is 
unclear.  This is a very low priority item - I don't know how much use 
it'd really get.

The very last step is proliferation.  Porting things that are wrappers 
around cdrecord to use the libburn interface instead.  I'd love to see k3b 
using libburn as a back-end someday.  Also useful might be a command line 
front end that exactly mimics cdrecord.  So people could use libburn with 
their favourite "legacy" burning application.

Other tidbits... VCD support, to the extent that it belongs in the back 
end.  (avi->mpg conversion wouldn't appear to be libburn's problem, but 
the sector headers for mode2 are).  And there are probably some fairly 
obscure things CDs can do that libburn currently can't.

"on the fly" copying might be a nice feature to have someday, I haven't 
thought much about how to implement this, because I've always thought of 
it as a pretty bad idea.

I'm sure there are things I've forgotten.  If anyone has any other ideas, 
please suggest them. :)