cdrkit (fork of cdrtools) uploaded to Debian, please test

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Hi

we, the Debian maintainers of cdrtools, the cdrecord/mkisofs/cdda2wav
program suite, just uploaded cdrkit into the Debian archive. It will hit
your unstable box with the next run of dinstall, please help us and test
it.

This is a fork of the well-known cdrtools suite provided by J=F6rg
Schilling. It will replace his cdrtools package in Debian (cdrtools will
be removed a day later). The tarball for this release
can be found on http://debburn.alioth.debian.org/ or on your friendly
debian mirror after the next archive run.


Now we need your help to be sure we release a working version with etch.

If you are a user:

 - test it, with whatever you have to burn. Report anything broken which
   is not the fault of your hardware :)


If you are a maintainer of a program depending on cdrecord/mkisofs/cdda2wav:

 - change the dependency from cdrecord to wodim and change your program
   to call wodim, not cdrecord
 - test your program if it continues to work with the changes. In theory
   it should, but we all know Master Murphy just too well.



Now, for the background on why we took the decision to fork cdrtools:

Forking cdrtools as cdrkit
=2D-------------------------


So, why the fork? CD/DVD burning is a complicated business that needs a
lot of knowledge, so forking such a big collection isn't a step to be
taken lightly. It requires a lot of development effort that could be put to
better use elsewhere.

In the past, we, the Debian maintainers of cdrtools, had a good and
mutually cooperative relationship with J=F6rg Schilling.  He even
commented on Debian bug reports, which is one of the best things an
upstream maintainer can do.  Naturally, there were occasionally
disagreements, but this is normal.


Unfortunately Sun then developed the CDDL[1] and J=F6rg Schilling
released parts of recent versions of cdrtools under this license.
The CDDL is incompatible with the GPL.  The FSF itself says that this
is the case as do people who helped draft the CDDL. One current and
one former Sun employee visited the annual Debian conference in Mexico
in 2006. Danese Cooper clearly stated there that the CDDL was
intentionally modelled on the MPL in order to make it GPL-
incompatible. For everyone who wants to hear this first-hand, we have
video from that talk available at [2].

You can read the FSF position about the CDDL at [3]. The thread behind
[4] contains statements on the issue made by Debian people; for more
context also see the other mails in that thread.
In short -  the CDDL has extra restrictions, which the GPL does not
allow.  J=F6rg has a different opinion about this and has repeatedly
stated that the CDDL is not incompatible, interpreting a facial
expression in the above-mentioned video, calling us liars and generally
appearing unwilling to consider our concerns (he never replied to the
parts where we explained why it is incompatible). As he has basically
ignored what we have said, we have no choice but to fork. While the CDDL
*may* be a free license, we never questioned if it is free or not, as it
is not our place to decide this as the Debian cdrtools
maintainers. However, having been approved by OSI doesn't mean it's ok
for any usage, as J=F6rg unfortunately seems to assume. There are several
OSI-approved licenses that are GPL-incompatible and CDDL is one of
them. That is and always was our point.


For our fork we used the last GPL-licensed version of the program code
and killed the incompatibly licensed build system. It is now replaced by
a cmake system, and the whole source we distribute should be free of
other incompatibilities, as to the best of our current knowledge.


Anyone who wants to help with this fork, particularly developers of
other distributions, is welcome to join our efforts. You can contact us
on IRC, server irc.oftc.net, channel #debburn, or via mail at
[e-mail:debburn-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org]. Our svn repository is
http://svn.debian.org/wsvn/debburn.


[1] http://www.opensource.org/licenses/cddl1.php
[2] http://meetings-archive.debian.net/pub/debian-meetings/2006/debconf6/th=
eora-small/2006-05-14/tower/OpenSolaris_Java_and_Debian-Simon_Phipps__Alvar=
o_Lopez_Ortega.ogg
[3] http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html
[4] http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2006/08/msg00552.html

=2D-=20
bye Joerg
 doogie: you have an interesting definition for 'interact with
people' that means 'make them want to jump off cliffs'

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