udffsck is missing

[Alejandro Mery]

Binary package hint: udftools

UDF is the alternative we have to get rid of fat32, with it's patents and limitations. Ubuntu's udftools package misses udffsck which is an essential component if one plans to use UDF in flash devices and hard drives. Of course fsck.udf and mkfs.udf wrappers would make it even better but having the actual tools is enough for now :-)

[Sergio Callegari (callegar)]

I guess that the issue is that the udffsck provided by the upstream sources does nothing and is a mere placeholder.

The real problem here is that the upstream udf project is very very dead

http://www.unmaintained-free-software.org/wiki/Linux-udf

Hence, udf support in linux is practically restricted to a write-once or a read-only usage, until someone steps in to resuscitate the project. No option to use it as a substitute for FAT, FAT32 and VFAT.

There was once an ubuntu community member who stepped in to take over the work of ben fennema (PhillipSusi) as shown in https://wiki.ubuntu.com/PacketCD. However this effort too seems to have stalled.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[dreamcat4 (dreamcat4)]

The most logical thing to do would be port the OpenSolaris source code to linux. It is available here:

http://src.illumos.org/source/xref/illumos-gate/usr/src/cmd/fs.d/udfs/fsck/

AFAICT it is pretty self-contained. This should really be made a priority first of all.

2nd priority after that, improve write support of UDF v2.60 to match the other operating systems (Windows and Mac OS X).

Not sure who is going to do it, if the 'upstream project' is inactive. But really this can be done independently. Perhaps there is motivation enough from community contributions. As there are many people who want / need this.

Incoming References:

http://askubuntu.com/questions/521900/fsck-tool-for-udf-filesysyem-in-14-04

http://tanguy.ortolo.eu/blog/article93/usb-udf

https://lkml.org/lkml/2014/8/25/526

http://sourceforge.net/projects/linux-udf/

http://sourceforge.net/projects/iomrrdtools/

[Unxed (unxed)]

https://github.com/pali/udftools

[Christoph Anton Mitterer (calestyo)]

Hey.

FIY: It seems netbsd developed a fsck for UDF[0], but it would require porting to LInux.

Cheers,
Chris.

[0] https://wiki.netbsd.org/projects/project/fsck_udf/