Give us back cdrtools!

[minthaka]

How could I force Debian based distros to:
1. Drop cdrkit (it's buggy, it's moronic....)
2. Ask Jörg Schilling's forgiveness for the theft they committed.
3. Use again cdrtools, as it is so much better, with excellent options, stable etc.

I'm serious about it. I've had a lot of troubles with cdrkit (burning speed, errors at burning...) and just today I've realized that it misses the tool 'isoinfo', which is included into cdrtools, and which makes possible listing of a .ISO image.

[GNU-Fan]

A. Become a reputable Debian maintainer.
B. Ask for forgiveness.

[reed9]

Contrary to some rumors on the web, cdrkit is maintained. The latest stable release was in Oct. of 2009. There isn't a central bug tracker I could find, but the Debian tracker is here. As of right now, there are 98 outstanding bugs listed, with 19 listed as "important". I'm afraid I couldn't find anything comparable for cdrtools. But, the number of bug reports there doesn't seem unusually high to me.

As for forgiveness...they didn't steal anything. The used code licensed under the GPL, so they had every right to make a fork. Schilling alleges a number of violations of the GPL, of course. I am not qualified to comment on the validity of his claims. But most of his complaints involve improper attribution to him and cdrtools in the source. I'm curious about his allegation that the Debian sources are incomplete and can't be built. I think I'll try.

So long as cdrtools is licensed in part under the CDDL, Debian will not distribute it. They are not alone is stating that the CDDL license is incompatible with the GPL. The GNU Project specifically lists the CDDL as an incompatible license as does the Free Software Foundation.

As shown here, almost all of cdrtools is licensed under the CDDL currently.

So, it is very unlikely they will switch. However, it is easy enough to use the original if you so choose, so why complain? What does it matter that cdrkit, which works perfectly well for most people, is the default?

(And just FYI, I use the original cdrtools.)

[minthaka]

I'm using it too. I've compiled it from the sources, but I think the very fact that there's no package for Debian, shows you don't have a choice. And if you approach the things from a newbie's point of view, compiling anything from source is rather dready.

About the licenses: if you are using the name, let's say cdrecord, and under the hood you are running a crap called wodim, that isn't ethic at all! And that's the situation with Ubuntu (=humanity to others).

Fortunatelly I found that less replaces the isoinfo (off course no documentations at all), so it's still possible to list .ISO files. Now, since I'm working on an application for various distros, I'll only have to discover whether a certain distro uses cdrtools (hailed be Fedora!) or cdrkit. Nice isn't?

The more honest works, the better releases.

[reed9]

The debian based grml distro maintains a package of cdrtools.
Index of /pool/main/c/cdrtools/
Index of /

But just like with any program, it isn't infringing on user choice not to provide a package. If you don't like it, use a different distro that does. If you don't like that Debian doesn't include the firmware for various intel wireless chipsets out of the box, use Ubuntu. If you don't like that Ubuntu doesn't include Adobe Flashplayer out of the box, use Linux Mint. Debian provides thousands more packages than RHEL. Is RHEL restricting the user's freedom of choice by not providing all those packages?

I imagine the symlinks to cdrecord et al are to maintain compatibility with various apps the were built to use cdrtools. But I don't really know. Schilling alleges that as a violation of the GPL, presumably Debian doesn't think so. Without knowing a lot more than I do regarding the intricacies of the GPL and copyright law, I can't comment on the ethics of the matter. But it still isn't theft. The issue is whether they have the right to use the name cdrecord to call wodim.

[hazel]

I have an external cd writer with a usb connection and I could never get it to work with cdrecord. But it does with wodim. cdrkit may be buggy as all hell but it works for me.