Firewire mess

Yesterday I stumbled upon a task to transfer few recordings from miniDV camera to my laptop. The camera had the iLink output, so did my laptop. I thought that this should be easy. It wasn't.

I prefer to use Debian kernels. Since 2.6.22 they have disabled old ieee1394 stack in favour of new 'juju' one. OK. But the libraries still aren't updated to use it. Fine. Let's build them. Needless to say, that even with libraw1394 updated to include juju supoprt, dvgrab failed to work.

After some experiments I decided to surernder. After a couple minutes, I've built the old ieee1394 stack, fired the dvgrab with original libraw1394 and started grabbing w/o any major glitches.

I won't ask, why the experimental and still uncomplete stack was merged into mainline kernel. I won't ask, why applicatoins still aren't fully updated to use it. But why the hell did Debian kernel maintainers disable old ieee1394 stack?! If they enable such "beautiful" features, why won't they switch off most of the IDE subsystem in favour of PATA which is much more mature?