Ext2 on CDROM?

[Bill White <bill.white@griggsinst.com>]

Does anyone know if there is a problem with putting an ext2 file system on
a CDROM in the same way one usually does an iso9660 file system?  That is,
if I write a program which creates an ext2 filesystem as a big file, and
pipe it to cdrecord or something like that, can I reliably mount the CDROM
and read from it?  I know that (1) I can't write to it like a hard disk,
since it's read only and (2) creating the ext2 filesystem is a small matter
of programming.

I have tried this by dding a tiny little, wee filesystem (my /boot partion,
which has about 5Mb) directly into cdrecord.  It seemed to work, as the
diff told me that data on both the original and the CDROM were identical.
But I want to use this as a backup mechanism, and I would not like to do a
lot of work on it, only to find out that it is known to be unreliable.

Thanks.