3 ms·
What a strange article. What's called an 'ISO' is, these days, pretty much a thin wrapper for an UDF file system -- you can definitely use it differently as wel
by PreInternet01 2y ago
What a strange article. What's called an 'ISO' is, these days, pretty much a thin wrapper for an UDF file system -- you can definitely use it differently as well, but I'm pretty sure nobody has created, say, an ISO9660 plus Joliet plus El Torito image in the past decade or so.
And, no, UDF isn't great either, but I wouldn't say it "has to die": it's a pretty convenient distribution format due to being widely supported, as it's really simple to implement.
So, this mostly seems to be a rant against live-CD-style Linux distros, since those are hard on maintainers (plus: toxic community multiplier)? On the one hand that might be true, on the other hand, the 'hey, here is how you get an ext4 or whatever filesystem in RAM' tooling around that is so mature and convenient that it's hard to see why, and I can't distill any real arguments from this...
- tux3 2y agoOh I'm sure people still use El Torito today! I remember having to go through that to boot my hobby OS. Admittedly that was some years ago, but you can still find fresh Github issues of lost souls who still use bootable ISOs
- PreInternet01 2y agoYeah, but I'd call that 'remnants of El Torito'? You basically have tooling to burp out the MBR, boot catalog and UEFI FAT32 shim, all pointing at the native code that can read your actual (very-much-non-ISO9660) file system into RAM and bootstrap it, and you're good to go on USB, ISO, or whatever. The first 3 parts aren't that complicated (literally a few sectors with fixed content, maybe a few pointer fixups), and no reason IMHO to want to kill off ISO. Generating that actual file system is the hard work, but also required for live-USB distros, which circles back to the point being made in the article eluding me...
- Netch 2y agoLive CD is mainly replaced with live USB, even if it is called the same nickname.
- nine_k 2y agoI think the author speaks about *.iso, referring to the customary extension of ISO9660 image files. I think the author speaks about the particular Linux distro, and with implications for more Linux distros which use live images on USB sticks* for booting and also* as a removable durable storage. I think that the whole rant should be namespaced under "Live distro images" / "Puppy Linux", like "Why ISO image format should be retired from the live images of Puppy Linux", and not in the general case.