X and LSB

Dale Scheetz dwarf at polaris.net
Thu Mar 16 06:14:41 PST 2000


First I must appologize for being so busy this week. It has kept me out of
this very intersting discussion ;-)

As "the" Debian representative on the LSB committee, I can say with
authority that including X in the spec is _not_ an action to attract
commercial ventures. Debian has been including the basic X libraries in
its standard distribution for ... well a long time (I honestly don't
remember when). We do this because the cost of including those libraries
is less than the penalty for not doing so. Many console apps also need X
interfaces for those times they run in an xterm. Being able to install
these programs on systems without X installed, without having to have
two binary versions, is exactly the reason we include the basic X
libraries. 

The LSB spec would be very broken without these libraries included.

Luck,

On Thu, 16 Mar 2000, Daniel Quinlan wrote:

> Robert W Current Jr Ph D <current at hel-inc.com> writes:
> 
> >> The goal of the LSB is to guarantee that third-party applications can
> >> run on any LSB-compliant Linux distribution.  
> 
> > This is a major stance your taking, and I think you may regret it.  By
> > saying the LSB is in place to service only ISVs and the like, the LSB will
> > essentially be seen by the Linux community as "A orginization trying to
> > impose standards so that commercial software vendors can exploit Linux.
> > The LSB has no basis in defining standards for Linux, but rather is an
> > orginization that serves as mediator between the Big 3 Distributions and
> > commercial software vendors."
> 
> Third-parties is anyone that isn't the local sysadmin or a distribution.
> That includes both commercial software vendors, independent developers,
> etc.  That's anyone that packages software for use on more than one
> distribution.  Yes, that includes commercial software vendors, but they
> aren't our enemy.
> 
> We also have participation from a lot more than "the big 3"
> distributions (whichever those are).  Debian (a non-commercial
> non-profit distribution) is one of groups participating and large chunks
> of the draft LSB standard are almost straight out of the Debian policy
> manual.  We also have non-x86 based distributions as members, at the
> last LSB meeting, etc.
> 
> >> Calling the inclusion of X "big and bloated" or talking about whether
> >> or not a server is configured to include X is disingenuous.
> 
> > Well, that's something I can accept in consept, that it's just some core
> > libraries.  But, it sort of makes the point meaningless, doesn't it?
> > Require X libraries, but not any form of X itself? 
> 
> Nope.  You only need the X libraries to run the application.  Set the
> display to run on some machine running an X server (an X terminal is a
> good example) and the application will work.
> 
> > Well..  That's potentially short sighted as well.  In the evolution of
> > software, continuing to hang on to legacy compliance will always decrease
> > productivity, and increase bloat.
> >
> > If that was not the case, then there would be no issue when a new glibc
> > came out... because it would encompass all of the old glibc.  But, that is
> > not the case.  The fact remains, the libraries can co-exist, but do not
> > (for good reason) always include identical and increased functionality
> > of the older versions.
> 
> The library symbol versioning provided by glibc 2.1 helps alleviate the
> potential for bloat.  It is not necessary to include entire copies of
> libraries to provide backward-compatibility.  Are you aware of this
> feature?
> 
> Dan
> 
> 
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Dwarf
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