87 lines
3.2 KiB
TeX
87 lines
3.2 KiB
TeX
\section*{Preface}
|
|
\label{preface}
|
|
|
|
Since the release of dvdisaster 0.79.3\footnote{Version 0.79.4 was never finished
|
|
and released.}, nearly five years have passed.
|
|
This was partly due to changed circumstances in its
|
|
primary developer's life, but there was also a lot of
|
|
coding going on behind the scenes. In comparison with its
|
|
predecessor, dvdisaster 0.79.5 comes with lots of its
|
|
internals being significantly reworked.
|
|
|
|
\smallskip
|
|
|
|
The most visible improvement of dvdisaster 0.79.5 is, of
|
|
course, its multithreaded RS03 codec. While it takes
|
|
about 62 minutes for protecting a 36 GiB image with RS02
|
|
on a mid range PC,
|
|
the same task is done with RS03 in less than 7 minutes
|
|
using 6 processor cores on the same machine.
|
|
On a high end server with at least 16 cores and very good I/O,
|
|
this can be done in under a minute. That's quite an
|
|
improvement.
|
|
|
|
RS03 is ready for production use in the current release.
|
|
Some non-essential features, especially reworking the
|
|
adaptive reading for use with RS03 and multi-threaded
|
|
RS03 decoding (media fixing) will be delivered with
|
|
the following dvdisaster releases.
|
|
|
|
\smallskip
|
|
|
|
Other parts of the project had to be changed or even
|
|
discontinued. A software project lives on development
|
|
and continuous releases; else the
|
|
project will eventually die. In this respect, dvdisaster
|
|
was very endangered in the last few years.
|
|
To prevent this from happening again, most effort
|
|
is now directed into source code development;
|
|
everything else is delegated or discontinued.
|
|
Source code development basically means making
|
|
the GNU/Linux version, which provides the code base
|
|
for all other versions, and the FreeBSD and NetBSD ports,
|
|
which are very easily derived from the GNU/Linux code.
|
|
This is not the case for the Mac OS and Windows ports,
|
|
which are, unfortunately, \tlnk{qa-discontinued-os}{discontinued} as of now.
|
|
|
|
Another feature which has to go are the separate
|
|
stable and development releases.
|
|
Starting with this version, all dvdisaster releases
|
|
are considered production quality, so there is no
|
|
need for different branches anymore.
|
|
|
|
\smallskip
|
|
|
|
Maintaining the multi-lingual online documentation, which
|
|
also served as the project home page, did also prove to
|
|
be too time consuming. The project home page has
|
|
been changed into a simple download platform for
|
|
the project sources. It is now directed at package
|
|
maintainers who will create and pass on binaries
|
|
for the GNU/Linux, FreeBSD and NetBSD distributions.
|
|
|
|
The program documentation, which you are reading
|
|
right now, is provided in PDF format which is much
|
|
easier to author than the HTML version. The only
|
|
language available is English. Most parts of this
|
|
manual have been adapted from the old online
|
|
documentation, so it still feels more like a website
|
|
than a book. While hyperlinks are not as usable in PDF
|
|
as in HTML, they have been kept in this document to
|
|
stress that it is intended to be used as an online reference.
|
|
So please do our environment a favour and do not print
|
|
this manual. It is not meant to be read
|
|
from front cover to back cover, anyways.
|
|
|
|
\smallskip
|
|
|
|
Okay, enough ranting already. May dvdisaster be helpful
|
|
in protecting and recovering your valuable data,
|
|
and thanks for using it!
|
|
|
|
\bigskip
|
|
|
|
{\em -- -- cg, August 2015}
|
|
|
|
|