DVD backups - bug or feature?

[Bob Billing]

I spent a few frustrating hours yesterday turning DVD+R blanks into
coasters before I realised that there seems to be a deep problem with
the whole DVD mechanism. Since this seems to be a bug in the philosophy
of the system, rather than any specific module, I hope I can raise it
safely here.

My root partition on this system contains about 6.2G of files. This
includes things like the entire Hubble sky survey and the complete
Ordnance Survey map database for the UK. Backing it up as a bzipped tar
file gave me 2165096516 bytes of data. This is just over 2G - in fact it
is hex 810CC044. I then burned this on DVD with growisofs.

When I mounted the resulting DVD the file had shrunk to 835652 bytes.
This is in fact 000CC044. The "cruft" option had cut in and removed the
high byte of the file length.

Now this is the problem: Is mkisofs/growisofs right to allow a file over
2G, and mount is wrong? Or is mount right, the top bit of the file
length should never be set and mkisofs should have rejected it?

Either way it seems that as a DVD is longer than 4G there is no way,
within the standard, of burning a DVD that contains a single 4.7G file.

So should I:
1) Report a bug in mkisofs?
2) Report a bug in mount?
3) Develop a workaround (I already have one)?
4) Use a different filesystem?

-- 
Robert Billing,                   Tanglewood,
01344-772849                      64, Pinehill Road,
rbilling at tnglwood.demon.co.uk     Crowthorne,
http://www.tnglwood.demon.co.uk/  Berks, RG45 7JR