Re: [linux-minidisc] another way to send SCSI commands

[Adrian Glaubitz <glaubitz@physik.fu-berlin.de>]

Hi Michael,

On Dec 3, 2010, at 3:23 AM, Michael Karcher wrote:
> 
> I found that dvd+rwtools contains a refreshingly simple GPLed (without
> any restrictions like "you need to modify author name" and so on) SCSI
> abstraction layer that covers the following operating systems:
>  Linux, OpenBSD/NetBSD, Solaris (license for distribution maybe
> questionable), FreeBSD, HP-UX, IRIX, Win32, Mac OS X.
> (see: http://fy.chalmers.se/~appro/linux/DVD+RW/ search for "run Linux")
> 
> The nice thing is that this library does not even think about adding
> some abstraction on device naming, so "/dev/sdb" works out-of-the-box on
> Linux while "E:" works out-of-the-box on Windows. I don't have a MacOS
> to test here.

This is incredibly good news. I was honestly never happy with having to deal
with libscg for the reasons you mentioned and I always had a bad feeling
about the CDDL license of the original package.

Now, when we can actually use GPLed software which even seems to be
easier to work with, I will be fully supporting this solution and prefer it over
our old version using cdrtools.

> 
> Sources for dvd+rw-tools can be obtained from here:
> http://fy.chalmers.se/~appro/linux/DVD+RW/tools/
> 
> Patches (one for a bug in the Linux header, one to suppress lots of
> warnings to compile with MinGW, one to lift the restriction of only
> being able to work on CD/DVD drives) are attached to this mail, as well
> as a simple test program that sends an "INQUIRY" SCSI command (reads
> vendor/model/revision). I would like to have it tested on MacOS X, too,
> if someone cares. It looks like a device node name is expected in the
> MacOS case too, just as in Linux.

Ok. I think I would like to wait for a reply from the dvd+rw-tools developers,
especially it would be that your patches be merged into upstream before
we start doing any work on implementing it that way. It would be very
nice to be able to link dynamically to the tools on Linux, to keep the code
as clean and lean as possible. And I prefer not to fork the code our
own and merge it into our branch. This way we will always receive
any bugfixes and updates in dvd+rw-tools automatically.

As for MacOS X, I can give it a try on my Macbook and also on the
Mac Mini, I think that it shouldn't be so much of a big deal to
compile and run it. Unfortunately, I don't have any MiniDisc hardware
lying around in Norway to test, but I think I could use some USB
sticks or harddisks or even CDROM. Fortunately, the tools are
also easily installable through Macports [1].

Thanks a lot for investigating into that. I would very glad if we can
drop libscg in favor of dvd+rw-tools.

Adrian

[1] http://trac.macports.org/browser/trunk/dports/sysutils/dvdrw-tools/Portfile