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Comment by EgoIncarnate | Hacker News Reader

It sounds like there was a config option available to disable the signature addition to the image file ( https://github.com/simh/simh/issues/1059#issuecomment-108689... ). I could see a benefits for having an embedded image signature for preservation and corruption detection issues.

I don't think complaining about the design is toxic, but recruiting uninvolved people on twitter, and harassing out of band certainly is. Also reading the bug thread it seems the person with the issue wasn't the same as the one who instigated the harassment. (https://github.com/simh/simh/issues/1059#issuecomment-108675...)

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Enabling it by default could break lots of valuable data over the history of computing. That's why I prefer simh-classic.

Not really; the signature is appended to the tail and can be safely ignored by things that don't know about it. This is a pretty thoughtful way to make the change.

It only really matters if you are doing something weird -- e.g. concatenating a lot of images together.

Having metadata instead of raw images is useful.

The thing was turned on for a couple years before anyone complained IIRC: and then suddenly it was a high-stakes issue with brigading, etc.

NEVER,

EVER

mangle your raw images, specially if you want to dd/tar them back to the original machine. Also, as a golden rule on IT, specially on emulation, NEVER do unexpected changes to the original media, be disk images, CD-roms, BIOS dumps or any other firmware.

If you want to make changes for interop, do it in RAM as a volatile change or write the metadata anything else on the emulator config directory.

The mentiones change is not useful, it really sucks. The move was one of the words turds ever done to historical computing and data preservation. Period.

The purpose of emulation is to run and preserve the original systems -unchanged- by design. The user is the one who commits the changes while he is running the emulated system from the inside, and not the emulator.

The goal is to preserve the data back and forth, not to ruin it.

> mangle your raw images, specially if you want to dd/tar them back to the original machine

dd back to the original media is no problem with stuff post-pended; dd will complain that there's an extra block at the end, but other than that, all's good.

> The goal is to preserve the data back and forth, not to ruin it.

A big part of the point of this change is to prevent you from attaching devices "wrong" in ways that are likely to cause the emulated environment to corrupt them. You can't do that in RAM, and it's better if it is in the same file.

>You can't do that in RAM, and it's better if it is in the same file.

No, that's a setting for the config file, or per machine by default in the settings, but never in the media itself.

The old media should be pristine. If the user mangles some media because it attached some cd image as an RP disk under a Vax, it's his issue, is not an issue of the emulator.

It's not "old media". It's a disk image in some format.

Before it was just a raw disk image.

Now it's a container format for a disk image--- that happens to generally work as a raw disk image, too.

Either one keeps the original data pristine.

No, you are wrong. Emulators should never touch the original data format save up for converting it at will, as qemu can do by using qemu-img.

That's a belief you have, but it isn't something that one can be "wrong" about.

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