mkisofs is a program that has been originally writen in 1993 by Eric Youngdale
and that has been extended by many people.
In 1997, after Eric Youngdale mostly stopped working on mkisofs, I added
mkisofs to the cdrecord source tree and started working on bugs and important
extensions.
After 2 years (in 1999) Eric Youngdale transferred the complete code reporitory
to me.
At that time, several people helped to enhance mkisofs. The most active one was
James Pearson - he is unfortunately no longer reachable since he became a father
years ago. Since that time, more than 5 years ago, I am the main mkisofs
maintainer.
Being now able to decide myself in mkisofs since 1999, I spend half a year only
with bug fixes and code restructuring to make the code prepared for the
future.... Now more than 8 years later, mkisofs has a lot more features than in
1999 and needs another code lifting.
As mkisofs is very powerful and supports many OS and filesystem-hybrids, it has
become a de-facto standard for creating ISO-9660 based filesystem images.
We are currently a short time before the next "stable" release of cdrtools and
I am planning to start a bigger code clean up after that time. The current plan
is to do it the following way:
- cdrtools-xxx.zzz-final (the next "stable" release) will be the last
release that includes all features that are currently in mkisofs.
People who need these features (e.g. because they own old hardware)
need to keel the version of mkisofs that is included in the next stable
version of cdrtools.
- The ability to create "Apple-Hybrid" filesystem images causes problems
since many years already because the "Apple HFS" filesystem type does
not support files > 2 GB and includes other limitations.
- Support for this old filesystem is only needed for owners of
Mac OS 9 systems and for people who like to boot Apple PPC
based systems. These Apple PPC based systems are out of
production since 3 years already.
- Recent Apple systems boot using El-Torito extensions and
understand UDF + Apple extensions. Both is supported in mkisofs
since a while.
It seems that support for "Apple HFS" is no longer needed in mkisofs
and removing the support could help to clean up the code.
I am planning to remove the "Apple-Hybrid" support with the developer
versions for cdrtools that follow the next stable release of cdrtools.
People who believe that this change would cause problems are called to explain
their arguments. Please comment.