cant burn a cd iso

[Rick C. Petty]

On Tue, Jun 30, 2009 at 09:13:36PM +0200, Joerg Schilling wrote:
> "Rick C. Petty" <rick-freebsd2008 at kiwi-computer.com> wrote:
> 
> > The port available in sysutils/cdrtools-devel is 2.01.01a59, so what's the
> > big deal?
> 
> It is not a big deal if this version is installed by default ;-)

What do you mean "by default"?  sysutils/cdrtools is not part of the base
installation of FreeBSD, that's why it's a port.  At some point down the
line you installed sysutils/cdrtools.  I'm just suggesting that you should
have installed sysutils/cdrtools-devel instead.

> > > What is the reason for following the "Old/Stable" link?
> >
> > Probably he was following the "stable" part.  This implies that the newer
> > versions are not stable, which is why there's a cdrtools-devel port.
> 
> As I mentioned before: stable means dead -> no longer taken care of.

Yes, we all know your interpretation of the world "stable", which is not the
expected meaning that FreeBSD folks generally intend when they use that
term.  I certainly would not call RELENG_7 "dead".  When someone sees one
link that says "stable" (not one stating "dead"), they assume that the
opposite means "unstable".  I suspect the port maintainer for cdrtools made
this assumption and choose "stability" over "possibly not tested as much".

> > > 2.01 is completely outdated and should be avoided because of many bugs (e.g. in 
> > > mkisofs).
> >
> > It's not always the case that newer versions are more stable and have fewer
> > bugs.  In fact, cdrtools in particular has been that way in the past, where
> > mkisofs(1) created ISOs which were buggy (in that they were not even
> > mountable, or sometimes were mountable but some of the file pointers went
> > past the end of the ISO).  In those times, I've had to drop back a version
> 
> During the past 5 years, I fixed dozens of bugs in mkisofs from the early days
> of mkisofs. A bug that matches your description did never exist.

That's a pretty far-fetched statement.  I will assume that you mean that
this was not a bug that you fixed or that you did an exhaustive search
through the reported bugs and did not find such a report.  I can assure you
that such a bug did exist around the FreeBSD 5.0 or 5.1 timeframe (six
years ago).  I had two vanilla machines building release images and one
machine's ISOs sometimes failed.  The two boxes had slightly different
cdrtools versions installed.  I downgraded the one and things worked
correctly.  I'm not 100% positive, but looking at my distfiles archive from
around that time, I believe the working version was 2.00.3 and the broken
version was 2.01a31.  I can't be too sure because I lost a number of
distfiles in my archive.

My test case to prove the cause of the issue was something like:

# mkisofs -v -pad -r -hide-rr-moved -o test.iso /5.1/R/cdrom/disc1/
# mdconfig -au0 -f test.iso
# mount -t cd9660 /dev/md0 /cdrom
# find /cdrom -type f -exec dd if='{}' of=/dev/null bs=1m \;

When it worked, the find generated no output.  When it was broken, I would
see I/O errors IIRC.

> > or two to get a decent ISO.  Maybe this is no longer the case since 2.01.
> > Maybe you should provide a short summary of the known issues in 2.01 that
> > are fixed in 2.01.01a60 and some assurances that the latter produces broken
> > images left often than the former.
> 
> As mentioned above, such a problem did never exist.
> 
> If you did observe such problems, you did not use mkisofs but something else.
> Did you use the defective fork from Debian? Did someone else modified your 
> local version?

Nope, just a vanilla FreeBSD install and some ports needed to build a
release, including cdrtools.

Note that my statements were not intended to criticize cdrtools, just that
I sympathize with port maintainers' desire to keep a more "stablized"
version around for things that are essential, such as ports used for
building a release.  Pardon the pun, but when you've been *burned* once,
you're more careful to avoid any repeats.  And I burned a lot of coasters
that day before I downgraded my cdrtools installation.

> > Also it would probably help if you were more civil about it.  Andriy asked
> > a reasonable question and made a reasonable assumption about the term
> > "stable".
> 
> I was and I am still very friendly and explained the meaning of the word 
> "stable". What is your problem?

It seemed like you were being demanding from people who are volunteering
their time.  Certainly your previous email seemed to me that you were being
somewhat arrogant as well.  However I will give you the benefit of the
doubt that you are attempting to be civil and I fully retract my statement.

Cheers,

-- Rick C. Petty