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Announcing mkisofs 1.13

Item posted by Robert Millan <robertmh> on Sat 09 Jan 2010 07:38:35 PM UTC.

I'm proud to announce the release of GNU mkisofs version 1.13.

This release implements a few new features relative to the previous one (mkisofs 1.12b5). But most importantly, the codebase has been updated to modern standards and the build system has been rewritten from scratch using recent GNU autotools.

A source tarball for the new release can be found at:

http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/mkisofs/mkisofs-1.13.tar.gz

and its GPG detached signature [*]:

http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/mkisofs/mkisofs-1.13.tar.gz.sig

[*] You can use the above signature file to verify that the corresponding file (without the .sig suffix) is intact. First, be sure to download both the .sig file and the corresponding tarball. Then, run a command like this:

gpg --verify mkisofs-1.13.tar.gz.sig

If that command fails because you don't have the required public key, then run this command to import it:

gpg --keyserver keys.gnupg.net --recv-keys DEA2C38E

and rerun the `gpg --verify' command.

This release was bootstrapped with the following tools:
Gettext 0.17
Automake 1.10.1
Autoconf 2.61

As this is the first release of GNU mkisofs in more than 10 years, some explanation is in order:

This program was initially written for the GNU system in 1993, by Eric Youngdale, who maintained it up untill 1997.

Shortly afterwards, a derivative of GNU mkisofs was incorporated into cdrtools, the CD/DVD recording package. In 2006, the cdrtools version of mkisofs spawned another fork: genisoimage, which was included as part of cdrkit package in the Debian GNU/Linux distribution.

Unfortunately, both forks of mkisofs shared the same problem: they introduced new code under terms that would made them incompatible with future versions of the GNU General Public License. Although this didn't cause any practical issues at the time, it became problematic when version 3 of the GNU GPL was released in 2007: code licensed under the incompatible terms couldn't be used by programs that adopted the new license.

Because of this, the GNU project has resumed work on mkisofs, starting with modernization of the codebase, bringing it to up-to-date standards, as well as implementing some unique features that are necessary for GRUB, the GNU bootloader.