[lsb-discuss] revisiting LSB Desktop certification

[Theodore Tso]

On Thu, Feb 01, 2007 at 12:54:49AM -0700, Matt Taggart wrote:
> > The only time a server would not have those libraries would be if it had
> > no applications that would be displaying on a graphical interface.
> > 
> > Hmmmm....maybe you would find a server like that in today's
> > world...maybe.
> 
> I install systems like that all the time (Debian in my case, but maybe 
> Fedora allows this?), mostly web and mail servers where my interaction with 
> the system is ssh for administration and http/smtp/imap/etc for users.

When we originally had this discussion years ago, the concern was that
even for servers, ISV's might have configuration or administration
tools that required the X libraries, where you would run the
configuration/administration program on the server, but pop up the
window over the network on your local desktop machine.  Hence, the
argument went, both to simplify the branding story and reduce
confusion, and because many ISV's might require the client libraries
anyway, was the reason why the X libraries went into the LSB core.
(Oh, and another argument which was used at the time is that the
additional set of libraries that we were mandated were relatively
small --- which might no longer be the case as we start adding a lot
more graphical libraries like Qt and GtK.)

Was that the right decision?  Well, hindsight is 20/20, and these
days, I think it's much more likely that configuration/administration
tools are going to use web interfaces instead of X applications.  So
as we start adding more and more Gtk, Qt, and maybe somedome GNOME and
KDE, I can certainly see why we might not want to include those in the
base.

Something we might want to do is to ask our ISV community.  Do any of
them have applications meant for the server (i.e., such as a Web
Application Server, or a Database Server, or a the Server half of a
Client/Server, Financial Service Application), which requires being
able to run an X application on the server machine?  If the answer is
no, then we have a pretty easy choice to make.

If one or two vendors have some obsolete application which relies on
the LSB (but hasn't certified against it), which dynamically links
against X but uses a staticly compiled Motif library to provide a
really crappy Motif application to configure/administrate their
server-based platform, then maybe it would be a different story.  But
this seems relatively unlikely to me.

							- Ted