X and LSB

[Jochem Huhmann]

* tytso at mit.edu wrote:

[agreed and snipped]

> If the ISV's don't have something like the LSB, they will simply code to
> a defacto dominant distribution, such as Red Hat instead.  This is not
> healthy for the Linux community, and Red Hat to their credit have been
> assisting in making a distribution nutral standard which ISV's can code
> against.   However, we need soemthing now.  Some ISV's have already, or
> on the brink of, giving up on LSB and simply using RedHat as the
> standard distribution.   

But: If the LSB is such vague because it tries to embrace too much, it
won't be sufficient to test against, so ISVs will take a distribution
that is "LSB compliant" and use that as test-case. That's in no way
better than just using Redhat as standard. IMHO there is no other way as
using existing systems as such a test-case, since ISVs don't produce
applications for the LSB but for the market. IMHO it is impossible to
embrace everything ISVs need with such a single specification. It can
only serve as a common ground to work from and to build other
specifications on top of that.

> This is not the only reason to be pursueing the LSB, but to me it's a
> pretty compelling reason.  This is also why I think the embedded space
> should be lower priority, since ISV's are much less likely to be
> shipping products that have to work in the embedded space.  We need an
> LSB that works well for people on servers who want to install packages
> such as Oracle, and for people on desktops that want to install Quake
> III.  And we need something that does this yesterday.

IMHO that is far out of the realistic scope for LSB. I will be glad if
reality proves me wrong, though.

        Jochem

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