3 ms·

I would say that's fine for Easy to drop their ISO9660 distribution format. The rationale makes good sense. And of course I'm going to fit in the mold of an en

I would say that's fine for Easy to drop their ISO9660 distribution format. The rationale makes good sense. And of course I'm going to fit in the mold of an entrenched, elderly, "old timer", digging in his heels and I'll re-state a fossilized opinion: In general, the ISO9660 format is great for distributing disk images for this reason: it's a mature, international, cross-platform standard. This is not important for a Linux distro that can be set up with ext3/4. But if you distribute something with wide compatibility, you'll still consider making it ISO9660, because a Mac user can roll with it,* and a Linux user will have no problem, nor will a Windows user run into difficulty mounting and reading it. Likewise, if you wish to generate this filesystem image, any of the above systems, and more, will have an app to create a standards-compliant ISO9660 image. In fact, most of the apps will help with staging all your data and assembling it into a nice package, that you'd otherwise want to make something like a build script to go from a bundle of files and data to a finished ext4 image. But for Easy, and any other Linux distro, we've long ago phased out actual optical discs (my elderly fossilized brain recalls Knoppix as a revolutionary "live CD only" distro) so swapping in ext4 images may liberate some devs and support techs. *I don't know actually--do Macs have built-in tools for ISO mounting? They had their own sort of ".dmg" file for "mount as a disk, install this software package", last I checked. And one popular extension is ".img", so Linux distros--stop confusing Mac users!

odo1242 2y ago
Double-clicking on an ISO file on macOS mounts it provides the file system is recognized. Read-only though.
- n_plus_1_acc 2y ago
  I think Windows does the same
inferiorhuman 2y ago
In general, the ISO9660 format is great for distributing disk images for this reason: it's a mature, international, cross-platform standard. ISO 9660 is a standard, yes. But what's actually standardized by ISO 9660 is exceptionally limited. Filenames are limited to 8.3 with a quite small character set literally just A-Z, 0-9, _, and a single dot. There are competing long file name standards, Microsoft's uses big endian UTF-16 as is tradition. The RockRidge extensions define support for POSIX semantics, unsure how well supported the POSIX permissions are. MacOS can indeed mount supported ISO 9660 images from the Finder. One of the big advantage of ISO 9660 (and I assume UDF) is that the superblock does not conflict with the HFS superblock so you do both with relative ease. The other big one is that ISO 9660 is quite simple to implement compared to the alternatives.
- alexey-salmin 2y ago
  > The RockRidge extensions define support for POSIX semantics, unsure how well supported the POSIX permissions are. Permissions are supported. I'd even say they are supported more than it is reasonable. It resulted in some rather painful mistakes when preparing a media if you're not experienced enough. I'm speaking not of an OS distribution, but rather of a quick CD you burned to share some files with your friend in 2004. You could make files only readable under root, unless CD is re-mounted with specific options which probably aren't available to a non-root user in the first place. You could set suid/sgid bits. You could set a userid which is useless on a target machine (can be remapped when mounting of course). Whereas all you really wanted in the first place was just "r" (not even "rrr") for data files and "rx" (again, not "rxrxrx") for binaries and directories. Curiously reading "man mkisofs" now I see there's an option "-r" which is like "-R but reasonable". This would've helped me a great deal back then, I wonder if it existed and I just wasn't aware.
  - josephcsible 2y ago
    > You could make files only readable under root, unless CD is re-mounted with specific options which probably aren't available to a non-root user in the first place. Doesn't Linux give non-root users read access to the CD's block device? And with that, couldn't you read whatever files you wanted anyway?
- AshamedCaptain 2y ago
  > Filenames are limited to 8.3 That is not true at all, not even in the original version of iso9660. And tou might argue UTF16 is a problem, but it is _strictly_ better than most UNIXy filesystems, that _do not standarize a character set at all_ and therefore leave that big part of the problem to you. Not hard to find ext images with mojibake...
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - inferiorhuman 2y ago
    That is not true at all, not even in the original version of iso9660. ISO 9660 Level 1 specifies 8.3, Levels 2 & 3 allow up to 30 characters. There is room in the structure for longer names but that is not standard compliant which is why you have competing extensions for LFNs. it is _strictly_ better than most UNIXy filesystems NTFS, HFS+ and later are UTF-16, ZFS is UTF-8. ext4 is the odd man out here. Joliet being UTF-16 isn't better it's roughly the same. RockRidge allowing UTF-8 isn't much better because most stuff will still encode RockRidge with big endian UTF-16. UTF-16 isn't great, and perhaps defensible at the time, but big endian UTF-16 is just asinine.
nullindividual 2y ago
Apple’s New Disk Image Format used the img extension. Fortunately not something you see anymore.
duskwuff 2y ago
> I don't know actually--do Macs have built-in tools for ISO mounting? Yes; it's supported by the same disk image framework as DMG. It's no longer usable for creating bootable images for Apple computers, though.

odo1242 2y ago

Double-clicking on an ISO file on macOS mounts it provides the file system is recognized. Read-only though.

n_plus_1_acc 2y ago
I think Windows does the same

inferiorhuman 2y ago

In general, the ISO9660 format is great for distributing disk images for this reason: it's a mature, international, cross-platform standard. ISO 9660 is a standard, yes. But what's actually standardized by ISO 9660 is exceptionally limited. Filenames are limited to 8.3 with a quite small character set literally just A-Z, 0-9, _, and a single dot. There are competing long file name standards, Microsoft's uses big endian UTF-16 as is tradition. The RockRidge extensions define support for POSIX semantics, unsure how well supported the POSIX permissions are. MacOS can indeed mount supported ISO 9660 images from the Finder. One of the big advantage of ISO 9660 (and I assume UDF) is that the superblock does not conflict with the HFS superblock so you do both with relative ease. The other big one is that ISO 9660 is quite simple to implement compared to the alternatives.

alexey-salmin 2y ago
> The RockRidge extensions define support for POSIX semantics, unsure how well supported the POSIX permissions are. Permissions are supported. I'd even say they are supported more than it is reasonable. It resulted in some rather painful mistakes when preparing a media if you're not experienced enough. I'm speaking not of an OS distribution, but rather of a quick CD you burned to share some files with your friend in 2004. You could make files only readable under root, unless CD is re-mounted with specific options which probably aren't available to a non-root user in the first place. You could set suid/sgid bits. You could set a userid which is useless on a target machine (can be remapped when mounting of course). Whereas all you really wanted in the first place was just "r" (not even "rrr") for data files and "rx" (again, not "rxrxrx") for binaries and directories. Curiously reading "man mkisofs" now I see there's an option "-r" which is like "-R but reasonable". This would've helped me a great deal back then, I wonder if it existed and I just wasn't aware.
- josephcsible 2y ago
  > You could make files only readable under root, unless CD is re-mounted with specific options which probably aren't available to a non-root user in the first place. Doesn't Linux give non-root users read access to the CD's block device? And with that, couldn't you read whatever files you wanted anyway?
AshamedCaptain 2y ago
> Filenames are limited to 8.3 That is not true at all, not even in the original version of iso9660. And tou might argue UTF16 is a problem, but it is _strictly_ better than most UNIXy filesystems, that _do not standarize a character set at all_ and therefore leave that big part of the problem to you. Not hard to find ext images with mojibake...
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- inferiorhuman 2y ago
  That is not true at all, not even in the original version of iso9660. ISO 9660 Level 1 specifies 8.3, Levels 2 & 3 allow up to 30 characters. There is room in the structure for longer names but that is not standard compliant which is why you have competing extensions for LFNs. it is _strictly_ better than most UNIXy filesystems NTFS, HFS+ and later are UTF-16, ZFS is UTF-8. ext4 is the odd man out here. Joliet being UTF-16 isn't better it's roughly the same. RockRidge allowing UTF-8 isn't much better because most stuff will still encode RockRidge with big endian UTF-16. UTF-16 isn't great, and perhaps defensible at the time, but big endian UTF-16 is just asinine.

nullindividual 2y ago

Apple’s New Disk Image Format used the img extension. Fortunately not something you see anymore.

duskwuff 2y ago

> I don't know actually--do Macs have built-in tools for ISO mounting? Yes; it's supported by the same disk image framework as DMG. It's no longer usable for creating bootable images for Apple computers, though.