[lsb-discuss] Notes on LSB not-quite-conference call, 8 Aug 2007

[Wichmann, Mats D]

A few people (I didn't take notes) showed up for the cancelled
call today, having not gotten the message until later.

To note the couple of topics that were mentioned (with some
amplification for those who were interested on the call or
may otherwise care):

- there's a new LSB database upload and matching Navigator

http://www.linux-foundation.org/navigator

which drastically increases the amount of application data
available for mining.  it also increases slightly the
number of distribution captures.  Several web pages that
contain information on this version are:

http://ispras.linux-foundation.org/index.php/LSB_Database_Updates
http://ispras.linux-foundation.org/index.php/LSB_DB_Navigator
http://ispras.linux-foundation.org/index.php/DB_Navigator_Releases
http://ispras.linux-foundation.org/index.php/About_LSB_Application_Testk
it_Manager


Note that as of today, there's some permission problem that shows
up in the "official" LF copy but not on local copies or the
copy hosted at ispras.  This should be resolved within 24 hours;
just ignore any warnings for now.

There is a mechanism now for capturing application data and
uploading it to LF for later inclusion in the database.
There were questions about whether a local instance of this
can be set up and loaded with local information.  Mats didn't
know the answer about the specific details of the question -
which was whether captured application data can easily be
uploaded.  The Application Testkit Manager page has some notes
on the ability to capture the data.

To set up a local instance in general, you need two things -

bzr branch http://bzr.linux-foundation.org/lsb/devel/dbadmin
bzr branch http://bzr.linux-foundation.org/lsb/devel/specdb

The former needs to go into a location accessible by your
webserver, and enabled.  Mats puts the dbadmin tree in
/usr/local/share/dbadmin and adds a file /etc/httpd/conf.d/dbadmin.conf
to his Apache configuration:

=== dbadmin.conf ===
Alias /dbadmin /usr/local/share/dbadmin
Alias /navigator /usr/local/share/dbadmin

<Directory /usr/local/share/dbadmin/>
  Options +FollowSymLinks
  AllowOverride All
  order allow,deny
  allow from all
</Directory>
===

dbadmin expects a local mysql database named "lsb", as noted
in the "Technical Notes" section of the LSB_DB_Navigator
page listed above. The easiest way to load this up is to
simply go into the branched specdb directory and type:

make install

We'll look around for information on how one would load
locally generated application data into such a local DB
instance,  as several participants expressed interest in
doing some analysis on local data without "polluting" the
Linux Foundation database. 


A second question was if there was any kind of application
categorization, such that one could drill down on interfaces
needed by, say "database servers".  This does not exist
at the moment but might be an interesting refinement.



- The Filesystem Heirarchy Standard (FHS) is included in
LSB by reference.  The mailing list for this project, which
is loosely affiliated with Linux Foundation, is hosted on
sourceforge.net.  The amount of spam on that list has been
irritating to some participants, wondering if it could be
throttled somehow.  One answer might be bringing the list
over to be hosted on linux-foundation.org where some controls
would be easier to apply.  However, no LF staff or other
affiliates have control over this; Mats will ping the owners
to see it they're interested in doing anything.

FHS discussion wakes up periodically, but is not very active.
There was a wakeup this week, and it's possible, if somebody
takes the ball, that there might be a push to a new version
by going through the buglist (which lives at
bugs.freestandards.org, note not the same as the LSB bugzilla
which answers to bugs.linuxbase.org) and handling the issues.
If this happens, we should make sure any LSB requests for FHS
work are actually reflected in that buglist so they get
processed.  Mats has added a few there but there are almost
certainly some that are missing.