Version:            (using KDE KDE 3.4.2)

(Submitted by Peter Cordes < peter at cordes.ca > through the Debian bug tracker)

Package: k3b
Version: 0.11.18-1
Severity: wishlist

 This is really an upstream wish, but I'm posting it while I think of
it.  par2 is a GPL'ed package in Debian that does Reed-Solomon forward
error correction for a collection of files.  When burning a data CD or
DVD, the ideal thing to do would be to include par2 files to fill out
(some of) the remaining space on the disk, so the data would be
recoverable even from serious scratches that make some earlier files
unreadable.

 k3b knows how much space is on a disk, but maybe mkisofs would be
better suited to include on-the-fly par2 generation.  It could take an
option for what size to fill out the filesystem to.

 For audio CDs, a data track could hold par2 files for the audio
tracks, to prevent data degradation if that CD is ripped later.  This
would offset the track numbers, so some warnings would be needed :(

 k3b could make it easy to do it manually by having an option to make
a symlink farm that pointed to all the files that would be going on
the disk, with their correct names.  Generating md5sums and par2
redundancy from such a directory would be easy.  To avoid confusion,
it's probably best for k3b not to try to automatically add files from
that directory to the iso filesystem, though.

 For audio CDs where k3b will decode some ogg audio, the symlink farm
could include fifos with .wav filenames...  (This would save a lot of
disk space and I/O time.)