Afew words about POSIX and mkisofs
A few things occur to me about the idea of changing the meaning of -L in
mkisofs:
1 - mkisofs is not part of the SuS
2 - there are many existing exceptions, the most common being the
meaning of -L in cc
3 - this change would break scripts and programs which generate calls to
mkisofs, potentially thousands of uses. Worse yet, there will be no
compatible subset of commands which does the right thing on "old" and
"new" implementations.
4 - Joerg is already unhappy about getting complaints about forked
versions which ship with many distributions, this is bound to generate
more as things break. And it will probably generate yet more forks.
Suggestion: keep the old command set as default and provide an option to
switch to POSIX compliant behavior if anyone but Joerg cares to use it.
Something like -use-posix-options comes to mind. Other solutions would
involve a config in /etc, an environment variable, or almost anything
a - which could be changed in one place
b - would be ignored by traditional versions on mkisofs
c - which would continue use of the traditional options
This is a far large issue than DVD support, since it is incompatible and
provides a lot of motivation for a fork. I really hope it can be
addressed in some widely satisfactory way.
--
bill davidsen <davidsen@tmr.com>
CTO TMR Associates, Inc
Doing interesting things with small computers since 1979
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