[lsb-discuss] Don't blame LSB and standards, please: was: Re: Fedora Plasma Product, feedback please

[R P Herrold]

On Fri, 28 Mar 2014, "Jóhann B. Guðmundsson" wrote:

> ( what is weights and measures other then standards ) but that undesputable
> fact aside I dont see how the failure of LSB as an standard which boils down
> to it being drive/dominated by Red Hat and Novell/Suse and the lack of it
> being capable of keeping up with changes in the GNU/Linux ecosystem, can be
> applied to the work that is being done here or it being mapped one to one with
> that work.

Wearing my centos co-founder hat, I assure that there is no 
'domination' there, and I've been present for more than a 
decade.  There formerly was some, when an addition of Java was 
being pushed by some enterprise stakeholders [Sun was still 
free-standing at that time], but that is ancient history by 
now

These days, there is just: participation.  As to 'keeping up', 
the Fedora mantra of 'move fast, be willing to experiment and 
break stuff' is scarcely something a standards track should 
aspire to

LSB starves from insufficient quantities of software 
engineering talent.  Its processes are in all material 
respects open, and based on free and open sources.  Anyone 
with the inclination can play along.  A request for help gets 
a thoughtful answer and pointer in under 24 hr (mailing list), 
in under 8 hr (IRC), and in under a week (bug tracker triage).  
Wiki rights are accessible with a mere registration to stop 
spamming. We run an open weekly conferencall and minutes 
result and cross our mailing list

We lost one FTE about a year ago, and there is just not enough 
horsepower.  We ran a all day (I had to leave after six hours)  
planning event at the LF Collab summit, with G+ and dial 
inaccess, all duly noticed on our mailing list, and a grand 
total of 6 people participated

Canonical seems to look solely to Posix these days. Fedora 
glances in our direction but does not seek LSB conformance 
certification, nor materially participate in our effort to get 
LSB 5 'out the door'.  Debian is so glacial and enjoys 
flyspecking and squabbling (witness the recent 'systemd' 
dustup and vote, that they don't participate much. The SUSE 
enterprise product tests and participates; RHEL 7 will add a 
new approach to conformance if the beta is any sign, and has 
had a representative filing bugs with us.  Oracle treats the 
OS as a foundation for its DB engine products, and does not 
really need an LSB imprimatur to sell its product

But it is like the child's story of _The Little Red Hen_ ... 
all will eat the bread, but few really are willing to 
participate in its preparation.  I can think of three people 
continuously present, triaging, and working bugs.  That's it

Probably we (LSB.next, so to speak) made a mistaken design 
choice to widen coverage at LSB 5 made two years ago, to chase 
later libraries (gtk / qt), rather than narrowing scope to 
core utility.  But that was what the ISVs and the certifying 
entities said was needed then.  I hacked back that wiki's list 
of deliverables, pretty ruthlessly over the past 9 months as 
we have worked on the release (feature based, rather than time 
boxed)

I cannot think of a single third party open bug on 5 filed 
after the first beta drop, and it is ready to go once we 
complete the rest of our P1 items

-- Russ herrold