Forking ancient mkisofs

[Eduard Bloch]

Hi people,

first let me say hallo. I am one of the Debian cdrtools maintainers, and
unfortunately I didn't pay this project much attention in the last
years. After another unpleasent dispute with the cdrtools upstream, I
decided that now it's time to stop working around problems and start
solving them. And I believe that this probject has a chance to make
cdrtools obsolete, sooner or later, similar to what Xorg has done with
XFree86.

So the actual question: what do you think about forking the ancient
version of mkisofs [1], and apply just the changes that people need? I
think that some new features in the cdrtools version have been developed
in a wrong way:

 - removal of an autonomous build system [2]
 - refactoring code to an ugly derivate of K&R style.
 - addition of some self-made charset conversion engine instead of
   regular iconv integration [3].
 - to restrictive default configuration. I would like to make
   -joliet-long default without getting complaints from a certain
   person
 - adding uncomfortable hacks for scripted execution instead of
   separating the code into library and interface parts. This way it
   could be integrated into growisofs more smoothly, for example.
   
I think the program should be renamed in order to not give the certain
person a chance to claim that we are violating copyright holder
protection acts by distributing "incompatible artwork easily confused
with the one from current maintainer". And I like shorter names like
"miso" (garbled mkisofs abbreviation, not registered on Freshmeat yet).
Changing the name would also make it easier to deprecate some things
like the -i option.

I think most patches that have been submitted to cdrtools author by
other people should be portable to this fork with a feasible amount of
work.

Eduard.

[1] http://www.tux.org/pub/tux/eric/mkisofs/mkisofs-1.12b5.tar.gz
[2] The old build system is still pretty useable
[3] We have a good working iconv patch communicating trough the new
charset conversion layers which is PITA, IMHO
-- 
<GyrosGeier> doogie, 25 m/s is pretty fast
<doogie> 40m/s from apache
<doogie> 25m/s is from java
<GyrosGeier> doogie, that's about 8 km/h.