Welcome, Guest. Please login or register.

Author Topic: DVDRtools (DVD-R/DVD-RW) burning sofware ported to AmigaOS  (Read 5078 times)

Description:

0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.

Offline System

  • Full Member
  • ***
  • Join Date: Jul 2003
  • Posts: 199
    • Show all replies
    • http://amiga.org
Re: DVDRtools (DVD-R/DVD-RW) burning sofware ported to Amiga
« on: October 21, 2003, 02:01:37 PM »
How come someone who is so "untalented" (his text: "since I am not a particularly talented C-programmer") can port a Linux app that uses ioctls and raw device access to use AmigaOS-style devices and commands (okay, not that hard) but can't add two or three lines to the argument parsing routine? getopt() is NOT a complex command :)

dvdrtools has an option for passing in your DVD device, is it too hard to parse a string "scsi.device:3" instead of /dev/hda3 ? Most of the code there is done for you!

If that's too complicated, there's getenv() (simply setenv save dvdrtools_device "scsi.device" and so on) which would solve all of those problems in about a microsecond.

Let's stop praising the "coolness" of this guy's work, until he learns to code :)

BTW a fully operational GUI-oriented CD and DVD burner is part of the SuperBundle (BurnIT), PPC native, and works damned well. So this port will be obselete for Pegasos owners soon anyway.

And AmigaOS 4.x supports Mount Rainier anyway (so they say) so burning a DVD is as simple as drag and drop, there, so they say ;)

*sigh*

Always the Amiga Community.. always awarding and rewarding people who do the least work, and shunning those who are truly pushing the envelope.

Remember us for providing you for hundreds of dollars/euros of free games and software, while you run some dumb Linux tools, will you?

=Neko=

(annoyed because he has to go into the city to spend £30 on a piece of plastic for his printer, instead of coding something useful.. )
 

Offline System

  • Full Member
  • ***
  • Join Date: Jul 2003
  • Posts: 199
    • Show all replies
    • http://amiga.org
Re: DVDRtools (DVD-R/DVD-RW) burning sofware ported to Amiga
« Reply #1 on: October 21, 2003, 11:43:58 PM »
I don't have anything personal against anyone here.

But before you all jump up and down shouting "wow this guy is great he's a genius!!!!", note how lazy his port is, and redundant given both MorphOS and AmigaOS' bundled DVD software, notwithstanding the fact that neither are publically available, either or both will be pretty soon.

I don't think it is at all "news" that some lazy coder did a straight port of some nasty GNU tool - there are websites full of lazy Linux ports out there.

If you think I'm being rude: maybe I am being "rude" in that I am calling someone lazy. But not without reason, which I happily gave, along with multiple solutions to the problem at hand which show that the feature is minimal effort to acheive.

Am I to be chastised for telling the truth, or being helpful and intelligent?

The guy who ported these tools can go through code to get it to even compile on AmigaOS or MorphOS, let alone work, yet he can't even add a handful of lines to allow you to specify the device and unit.

Now what do you call that, when it's at home?

He can, however, spend the time to write a huge explanation on his website of how he didn't add anywhere from 3 to 10 lines of code to the tools, make excuses about his competance, and in any case, instruct you have to download a new archive for each device!

Is that just an example of the inability to manage one's own time? Come on, enlighten me.

I actually have better things to do, that people are paying me to do, than fixing other peoples' lazy ports of Linux software and making it run better on MorphOS.

Like creating original MorphOS software. Improving the OS in general. Creating SDK components. Writing documentation. Writing proposals and design schematics. Coming up with great ideas for features. Implementing all of them! :)

With so much on my plate, and with myself and my colleagues seemingly getting no appreciation for the hard work we seem to put in, day in, day out, making hardware, designing the software and providing services to the Community (hey look, all you DCE repair people are getting brand new boards!), I don't feel at all motivated to give you another service that you'll all just whine about anyway, and call me "rude" or "arrogant" for it.

Is it rude to point out that someone could have spent 30 seconds more adding immense amounts of value and quality to their application, rather than writing a bunch of ugly HTML to excuse himself from it?

Is it arrogant to feel disappointed in the fickle nature of the Community, to point out that we have done so much work, and to be generally unenthusiastic about the comments we receive from bitching Amiga users?

Nope. I don't think so.

Let's see what YOU lot are doing to push the envelope around here, instead of just posting onto forums and arguing about what a real Amiga is?

=Neko=
 

Offline System

  • Full Member
  • ***
  • Join Date: Jul 2003
  • Posts: 199
    • Show all replies
    • http://amiga.org
Re: DVDRtools (DVD-R/DVD-RW) burning sofware ported to Amiga
« Reply #2 on: October 22, 2003, 03:52:28 AM »
Why complain about something that's free? Well, because being free is no excuse for being lacklustre.

Genesi aren't the only company or person worthy of praise. Sure. Maybe we make some mistakes too. We're worthy of some criticism. But some of it (of the calibre "you aren't Amiga so we dismiss everything you do as a tactic to con us") isn't justified at all.

But it'd be damned nice one day if I could show up for work, check a forum or two while I do a compile or a CVS checkout, and not see a bunch of people ignoring the great stories about our products, but instead going on and on..

"hey, wow, some guy lazily ported some rather buggy GNU tools"

As for the Amiga Community - yeah, it's a bunch of people all with different opinions and viewpoints, but one thing is strikingly clear in my experience: not enough people who know a good thing when they see it (new motherboards, new commercial software, new prospects), and too many people willing to accept any old #### (no AmigaOS 4 yet, and WAY too many ixemul-based simple recompiles being passed off as some kind of acheivement, http://amiga.sf.net as an example)

I know you've been waiting almost a decade for your fabled new Amigas, but settling for some of the solutions because of such poor reasons as "it's free", "Linux has it" and [insert sly dig at Eyetech and Amiga Inc. here] is just a little much.

Sure the guy did something for the Amiga. Why should we give him any credit for doing such a piss poor job, though, when he clearly had the time to sit down and resolve the issues he had, since he clearly spent a lot of time explaining it?

Here, let's put it this way:

Well done for porting the tools! But why couldn't you add a check for an environment variable, in the simplest case?

Not looking at the source right now, but let's assume he's using a string and integer variables to store device name and unit.

char *device;
int unit;

.. these are already in the source somewhere, in theory. Now, add these lines of code before the device is opened:

device = getenv("dvdrtools_device");
unit = atoi(getenv("dvdrtools_unit"));

if (!device) exit(20);

... 3 lines of code. 3 lines of code.
See how they run? See how they run?
Isn't it a bit lazy not to write those lines?
Is it really so hard to make these designs?
Have you ever seen such a thing in your life?
As those 3 lines of code.

=Neko=
(giggling)
 

Offline System

  • Full Member
  • ***
  • Join Date: Jul 2003
  • Posts: 199
    • Show all replies
    • http://amiga.org
Re: DVDRtools (DVD-R/DVD-RW) burning sofware ported to Amiga
« Reply #3 on: October 23, 2003, 02:01:33 AM »
I never said news items like this "deflect attention" from Genesi.

What I said was that news items like this (hardly the most exciting thing in the world) end up with a stream of 100% positive comments.

Whereas a news item about something GOOD (the Pegasos, perhaps, but there are other things totally unrelated to Genesi that get ignored..) is met with a stream of rabid criticism from all sides, not even related to the news item at hand.

All I'm saying is

1) dvdrtools is hardly the best thing since sliced bread

2) the port is rather slack at best anyway, so what's all the excitement about?

3) you wouldn't know a good thing if it slapped you in the face anyway, just like the rest of the Amiga Collective.

I prefer to live in a state of perpetual apathy, but it really pisses me off to see people recompiling boring #### Linux utilities rather than creating original works. There is more to the world than GNU tools.

At least if you ARE going to do it, most of them would do better if they were truly adapted to Amiga- or MorphOS-native ports (i.e. don't use ixemul if at all possible), and in dvdrtools' case, since I don't think it's possible to do what it does in an ixemul environment, at least they could have added 2 tiny little extra options if they did the work to abstract it!

BTW, the author provided an environment variable edition of his software now.. startling coincidence, eh? How do I specify the unit, though? :)

Also it should be noted that his changes don't seem to be available as source downloads, nor are they checked into Savannah. So, if I were to modify the source code, how exactly would I do it? :)

=Neko=