[rslifka]

A recent post from the author of BootCD indicates that it's on hold for Tiger.

Is there any relatively automated way to make a boot CD? The tutorials I've seen are a pain.

I'm surprised Apple doesn't have a function for creating an emergency boot disk, similar to what Windows provides.

Rob

[Chuckit]

If there were an easy way, I'm sure Charles would have made BootCD do that.

[rslifka]

[note to self, think before posting ]

Seriously though, I would have thought that Toast or Disk Utility would offer this. A checkbox perhaps, "Make bootable" ?

Again the logic being that if there was an easy way to do it, those applications would probably support it as well.

Rob

[CharlesS]

Well, the thing is that BootCD works on most PowerPC machines, but there are a few cases where it dumps to the console when it should be loading the loginwindow. I can't get any of my machines to do this, and I have no idea what would be causing it, but it's common enough, although a minority, that it would probably affect a significant number of people. I could release it now in its current state, and it would work for most people, and in earlier times that's what I'd probably have done. However, there are enough people on VersionTracker who look at a product and say "Version 0.7?! Why, if the version number starts with 0 then it must be 100% bug-free! And if it doesn't work perfectly on my Power Mac 7100 with a CPU upgrade running XPostFacto, then by golly, I'm going to leave a zero-star review here complete with comments on how I think the author should be bound and gagged and dumped in the ocean attached to a cement block!" that make me want to fix this before I release anything...

The other thing is that it doesn't work on Intel Macs, and won't until I can get one myself, which won't be for years.

[rslifka]

Hi Charles,

Thanks for the update! Perhaps release it as a beta? Or "nightly build," something that implies a glitch or two is expected?

VersionTracker bastards! Holding us hostage...

Rob

[CharlesS]

Thing is, a version number that starts with 0 kinda already means beta, I dunno. And it's already listed as "Beta" under License Type in VersionTracker.

The other thing is that I'll get flooded with support e-mails saying "It doesn't work on my machine, why is that?" to which the answer will be "I don't know." with the result each time being a review on VersionTracker saying "Didn't work. Developer couldn't help, because he's an idiot. Even though I don't know what a pointer is myself, I can say that."

I dunno, sooner or later maybe I'll figure out what the problem is...

[msuper69]

Originally Posted by CharlesS

Thing is, a version number that starts with 0 kinda already means beta, I dunno. And it's already listed as "Beta" under License Type in VersionTracker.

The other thing is that I'll get flooded with support e-mails saying "It doesn't work on my machine, why is that?" to which the answer will be "I don't know." with the result each time being a review on VersionTracker saying "Didn't work. Developer couldn't help, because he's an idiot. Even though I don't know what a pointer is myself, I can say that."

I dunno, sooner or later maybe I'll figure out what the problem is...

Why not release it with the warning that it doesn't work on a small percentage of older Macs? If it fails to work on a particular Mac, perhaps you could gather the information from System Profiler and send it to yourself via the Internet (with the user's permission, of course)? That way the user is not put through hassle of entering his system info. That would be like pouring salt on the wound.

I don't know what percentage of Macs are incompatible but you may never be able to be 100% sure that it will work properly on every Mac. By your logic, you may as well stop development.

Regarding user feedback on VersionTracker (or any other web site):

I always take what people say with a large grain of salt. There is no way to validate what they say. Why should I put a lot of faith in comments from total strangers? I would rather try the software myself on a test machine and make my decision based on my own empirical evidence.

[slugslugslug]

Or, why not just take it off VersionTracker? People might have to do a little extra work to find it, but they will have downloaded it from someplace that gives 'em ample warning, reminds them it's free and <1.0, and doesn't provide an easy, automated way to trash someone that many folks recognize as a helpful and constructive member of the Mac community.

Heck, you could just provide links to new versions in this thread periodically. None of the rabble will have to know

[CharlesS]

Originally Posted by msuper69

Why not release it with the warning that it doesn't work on a small percentage of older Macs? If it fails to work on a particular Mac, perhaps you could gather the information from System Profiler and send it to yourself via the Internet (with the user's permission, of course)? That way the user is not put through hassle of entering his system info. That would be like pouring salt on the wound.

I don't know what percentage of Macs are incompatible but you may never be able to be 100% sure that it will work properly on every Mac. By your logic, you may as well stop development.

Well, I was being kind of snarky with the PowerMac 7100 comment - it's actually having problems with a bunch of not-so-old Macs, which is the problem. The thing is, I have no idea what's actually causing it, because sometimes you have the same model, supposedly configured the same way, which works for one user but not the other. Then there's the AppleVSP kernel extension which seems to ball things up almost every time, but it only loads on some people's machines (you can check if it loads on yours by checking System Profiler and looking at Extensions), and I have no idea what causes it to load since it doesn't load on any machine I've had the ability to look at personally. I started a thread about AppleVSP some time ago on MacNN, and some people figured that AppleVSP may have something to do with a Bluetooth modem. Indeed, a few of the people who were having AppleVSP-related troubles had Bluetooth modems (and solved it by turning them off, too!). However, plenty of other people who also had AppleVSP load didn't have a Bluetooth modem, and I actually configured my cell phone (Motorola RAZR) as a Bluetooth modem to see what would happen, and although I don't have a data plan with my provider to actually make data calls, I used ZTerm to dial a few voice calls over Bluetooth, and AppleVSP still doesn't load here.

Regarding user feedback on VersionTracker (or any other web site):

I always take what people say with a large grain of salt. There is no way to validate what they say. Why should I put a lot of faith in comments from total strangers? I would rather try the software myself on a test machine and make my decision based on my own empirical evidence.

Yeah, but I'd like to have it working to a sufficient degree that it works for a large enough majority of users. I hate to have something rated 1 star on VersionTracker. Maybe it's just me...

Originally Posted by slugslugslug

Or, why not just take it off VersionTracker? People might have to do a little extra work to find it, but they will have downloaded it from someplace that gives 'em ample warning, reminds them it's free and <1.0, and doesn't provide an easy, automated way to trash someone that many folks recognize as a helpful and constructive member of the Mac community.

Heck, you could just provide links to new versions in this thread periodically. None of the rabble will have to know

Yeah, well the thing is, I'm not the one who posted it on VersionTracker in the first place. It actually pissed me off quite a bit when I discovered it there. Some idiot posted it without my permission, and then I had to get VersionTracker to transfer control of the listing over to me so I could even update it or have some say in what the description said. Originally, BootCD was exactly what you described - a little treat for the MacNN users who helped me to make my first bootable CD for OS X in this thread:

http://forums.macnn.com/90/mac-os-x/111633/making-mac-os-x-bootable-cd/

Now, I'll freely admit that I demonstrated an embarrassing lack of knowledge regarding OS X and UNIX in that thread (of course, it was 2001, and I was new to both at the time). But the thing was, it was fun back then - lots of people were helping contribute info on how to get it to work, and I just put the info together into a nice step-by-step procedure and made a GUI wrapper to automate the process. It felt a lot more like a community effort back then. Later on, that went away, but I still had a few people collaborating with me via e-mail, which was very helpful - we would throw ideas at each other, and eventually figure out something that worked. Everyone else who ever helped with this eventually lost interest, though, and I've been left on my own for some time now. At this point, I can make it work on my machines, and have been able to do so for a long time actually, but the same problems seem to crop up all the time on other people's machines, cases where I can't even determine the problem, much less the solution. And now, of course, the Intel Macs are out, which changes everything and would require a whole new version of BootCD, and the freaking man pages aren't even the same between the PPC and x86 builds of OS X, so I can't even begin to figure out what will be needed there... Basically, I've become really weary of this project. I wish I could just let it go. It wastes way too much of my time (which is why major progress tends to happen during school breaks, and not so much while classes are running), and my only reward most of the time is a bunch of nasty reviews on VersionTracker, a few nasty e-mails, and a whole bunch of support-related e-mails asking why it doesn't work on someone's machine. I'm actually relieved when it is something like a PowerMac 7100 with a G4 upgrade card, so I can just say "that's not supported" and move on. If fate wouldn't have stuck me with this project, I probably could have finished a bunch of other projects back when I had lots of spare time, projects that did supported, well documented things, and were thus much more realistic to maintain. Projects like Pacifist, my dead plist editor, my dead resource editor, my nifty little Classic printing pass-through that I never finished the installer for, some other dead projects...