Nautilus-CD-burner and multisession (non-)support

[Mikko Rauhala <mjrauhal cc helsinki fi>]

Hi everybody,

I'd like to bring some attention to Nautilus-CD-burner's lack of
multisession support in the hopes that this would generate enough active
demand for the feature for the developers to reconsider their WONTFIX
resolution to bug #120384¹. Usually, I'd leave it at arguing for the
feature in the bug report (which I have done several weeks ago), but
this is, in my book, an essential basic feature for a CD burner, never
mind that we're talking about the CD burner that many people take as
representative of Nautilus', and Gnome's, effectiveness. Simplification
is good, and nautilus-cd-burner owes much of its attractiveness to its
simple interface, but there is such a thing as oversimplification.

The only reason given in #120384 for not supporting multisession is that
CDs are cheap, and wasting them is therefore apparently not a concern.
This I also take issue with; first, I think that Gnome is not only being
targeted for rich countries, and the relative price of a CD in the third
world may not be that insignificant. Also, waste is waste, and I don't
think Gnome should really encourage, let alone "dictate" it (for users
of default Gnome software) without a good reason. More arguments can be
found in the bug report¹.

Also, adding multisession support would allow one to naturally resolve
another bug, namely overwriting CD-RW discs without warning (see bug
#160365 and the one it's marked as a duplicate of). One could simply add
an "Overwrite" checkbox while defaulting to appending. The current
approach appears to be to warn the user of impending doom, but this
probably requires an extra dialog box to be remotely useful, and this
again would be more intrusive than a simple (and, for multisession
support, necessary) checkbox.

In case some might take this personally, I suppose I should mention that
although I obviously think that the Nautilus-CD-burner developers have
made a mistake in this particular case, I mean no disrespect to them;
after all, everybody makes them, and aside from this single issue,
they've given us the best free data CD burner there is, in my opinion.
This is also why I think it's a darn shame that I can't really endorse
it for general use, and why it'd be nice if people who share my concerns
would politely share them also with the developers in the hopes that the
WONTFIX verdict would be reversed.

Cheers, New Year, and all that to everyone concerned.

¹ <URL: http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=120384 >
² <URL: http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=160365 >

-- 
Mikko Rauhala   - mjr iki fi     - <URL:http://www.iki.fi/mjr/>
Transhumanist   - WTA member     - <URL:http://www.transhumanism.org/>
Singularitarian - SIAI supporter - <URL:http://www.singinst.org/>