Why is rufus not available under FreeBSD ?

[Manish Jain]

On 2020-01-28 22:17, Polytropon wrote:
> On Tue, 28 Jan 2020 17:25:41 +0100, Evilham wrote:
>> On dt., gen. 28 2020, Manish Jain wrote:
>>
>>> Hi all,
>>>
>>> I had to update my BIOS a couple of days back, and for that I
>>> needed a
>>> bootable DOS USB pen drive. The only way to get this, I believe,
>>> is
>>> Rufus - which is Open Source and is available under Linux.
>>>
>>> sysutils/unetbootin should be able to do the job, but simply
>>> does not work.
>>>
>>> I was wondering why Rufus is not available under FreeBSD. I
>>> think it is
>>> one of the most useful applications I have ever come across.
>>>
>>> Thanks for any inputs.
>>> Manish Jain
>>
>>
>> This rufus?
>>
>> https://github.com/pbatard/rufus/wiki/FAQ#do-you-plan-to-port-rufus-to-linuxmac-ossome-other-os
>>
>> I have used it on Windows at some point and yeah, it's handy; but
>> the author makes a point of it being OSS but heavily dependent on
>> Windows' APIs.
>> So, I am really not aware of it being available for Linux either.
> 
> In this case, a documented procedure, or maybe a shellscript for
> the ports collection would be a better solution than trying to
> port something to FreeBSD that is heavily tied to "Windows" (it
> probably won't work with wine, will it?). I know that it is
> basically possible to create a filesystem image suitabe for
> USB sticks that boots into DOS, as I have done this decades
> ago. The assumption is: It worked decades ago, it should work
> today. The reality is: Well... ;-)
> 
> You should not depend on complex solutions (and in this case,
> only being available for a non-UNIX OS) in order to do something
> that is, more or less, easy, and does _not require_ "Windows"
> to be involved in any way. A native solution that works on
> FreeBSD would be nice to have.
> 
> 

Hi Poly,

I fully agree. Perhaps we should our own command, something like:

mkdosbootdisk <device> [OPTIONS]

Regards,
Manish Jain