LSB Commands and Utilities, Draft proposal

Daniel Quinlan quinlan at transmeta.com
Mon Jul 5 20:05:09 PDT 1999


"Jakob 'sparky' Kaivo" <jkaivo at ndn.net> writes:

> 1) There may be more commands that should be specified (e.g. the
> package manager, /sbin/shutdown).

There needs to be, at the very least, a way to install/upgrade/remove
LSB packages.  I would leave the command syntax unspecified, but leave
a place for it.
 
> 2) Where else should we diverge from UNIX98? Am I missing other things we
> do differently? Do we try to fix util-linux or just say we do things the
> util-linux way? Seriously, util-linux has more noncomforming but properly
> named and proper basic funcionality commands than any other package.

Maybe on a case by case basis.  Can you summarize the problems?
Perhaps we can fix them.  util-linux tends to be BSD-like, while POSIX
is more SVR4-like.
 
> SCCS commands - admin, delta, get, prs, rmdel, sact, sccs, unget, val, what
> Divergence: These commands are not required by LSB. Instead, {RCS and/or CVS}
> are specified for LSB compliance.
> Rationale: These commands are part of the SCCS package, a method of managing
> and controlling revisions to files. I am not aware of a Free Software
> implementation of SCCS. However, RCS and CVS do similar jobs, are available
> as Free Software, and are presently in widespread use on Linux-based
> operating systems.

Don't require any of these, as they are not required for applications.
 
> Compression commands - pack, unpack, pcat, compress, uncompress, zcat
> Divergence: These commands are not required by LSB. Instead, the equivalent
> commands (gzip, gunzip, and zcat) from GNU Zip are specified for LSB
> compliance.
> Rationale: Compress uses a patented algorithm and is therefore tricky to
> redistribute. Pack is marked as a legacy command in UNIX98. GNU Zip is Free
> Software unencumbered by patents, and also quite often produces better
> compression ratios than compress, as well as being the current de facto
> standard for compressed file distribution on Linux-based operating systems
> and other GNU-like operating systems.

Agreed.

> Printing commands - cancel, lp, lpstat, pr
> Divergence: These commands are not required by LSB. Instead, the BSD printing
> commands (lpq, lpr, lprm, lptest, lpc, lpd, lpf, and pac).
> Rationale: These commands are from the System V style of managing printers.
> Linux-based operating systems tend to use the BSD family of printing tools.

Would it be accurate to say that applications only need to know how to use
lpr and perhaps lpqm and lprm?

Wrapping lpr to provide lp is not too difficult, but lpr is definitely the
Linux de-facto standard printing command.
 
> Archiving utilities - cpio, pax, tar
> Divergence: UNIX98 marks cpio and tar as legacy and pax as mandatory. LSB
> marks cpio and tar as mandatory and makes pax optional.
> Rationale: Both tar and cpio are widely used in current package formats for
> Linux-based operating systems (cpio being used by RPM and tar being used by
> basically all software distribution).

This should depend on the LSB package format, although since some applications
may want to make use of cpio and tar, I think we should require them.

Dan



More information about the lsb-discuss mailing list