Re: How to react on a factually wrong Debian wiki change ?

["Thomas Schmitt" <scdbackup@gmx.net>]

Hi,

Greg Wooledge wrote:
> In the case of the BurnCd page, I actually *do* think that it would be
> of general interest to readers to have a paragraph explaining the limits
> of wodim, and when not to use it.

Let me try ... hrr-umm ... 

wodim was cloned from cdrecord in 2006. At that time, cdrecord had few
clue about DVD burning and hid this behind a 1 GB size limit of the
free program version. The full size version was not available at all.
wodim got implanted DVD-related code from an earlier cdrecord clone
which hacked around the size limitation.

But still wodim is handling any DVD as if it was a large CD-R.
This works halfways with DVD-R and, depending the medium state, with
other media after due rejection of inappropriate SCSI commands by the
drive.
But it is awful, specs-wise !

wodim is factually abandoned by its cloners Joerg Jaspert, Steve McIntyre,
and Eduard Bloch. Its home page is gone, its change history is gone.

In contrast to that, the doings of dvd+rw-tools (growisofs) and of libburn
can be justified by the MMC-5 specs. In case of libburn there is even an
active upstream developer (myself).

---------------------------------------------------------------------

But who wants to read about 12 year old quarrels between Debian Developers
and the upstream developer of cdrecord ?

My way to express the current technical situation was the statement:

  "wodim should better not be used with DVD or BD media."

which now became

  "Some believe it would be better if wodim were not used with DVD or BD
   media. Perhaps so, but there are many variables involved, most
   especially burner types and condition, and media quality.
   '''Burn on one does not necessarily mean readable on another.'''"

It is not the opinion of "some". It is the opionion of me, the expert (tm).

And yes, there are ill burners and media which produce poorly readble
results. But this is _not_ normal. If hardware behaves that way, then
it is to blame, and not the burn program.
(Even wodims's failures are repeatable.)


Have a nice day :)

Thomas