[lsb-discuss] it's official: LSB face to face and Packaging Summit, Berlin, Dec. 4-6, 2006

[Ian Murdock]

The date of the next LSB face-to-face and the first FSG Packaging Summit
is now set: December 4-6, 2006. SAP will be providing facilities for the
meeting at the SAP office in Berlin, Germany.

This will be a three day meeting. The first two days (Monday, December 4
and Tuesday, December 5) will be the LSB face-to-face meeting.
The primary agenda will be to finalize the LSB 3.2 roadmap and timeline.

Wednesday, December 5 will be the first FSG Packaging Summit. The goal
of the Summit is to bring together the key people in the Linux packaging
world and ISVs to discuss the future of Linux packaging. Topics will
include RPM, the role of other packaging technologies
(dpkg, APT, yum, etc.), and the needs of ISVs in packaging solutions:

  ISVs want to use their own installation methods (e.g., an
  installation script or a cross-platform installation
  framework like InstallAnywhere) rather than using the distros' native
  package systems. The reasons are varied, but typically have to do with
  controlling the user experience and providing better cross-platform
  support, since Linux is almost always just one platform that's supported
  among others. Current methods simply dump files in the file system and
  integrate poorly with the underlying package systems. The solution
  proposed at the LSB face to face in June is to construct an API to the
  package systems (dpkg, RPM, APT?, yum?) so that higher level installer
  frameworks can register with them. That way, third parties
  can completely control the installation experience, yet the end result
  is properly integrated with the distros' software management
  tools. More discussion is needed here, making it squarely a 4.0 issue.

I've started a wiki page for the LSB face-to-face and Packaging Summit
here, though there's not much there yet:

http://www.freestandards.org/en/LSB_face-to-face_%28December_2006%29

More details will be posted both here and to the wiki page as we have
them.

-ian
-- 
Ian Murdock
317-863-2590
http://ianmurdock.com/

"Don't look back--something might be gaining on you." --Satchel Paige