[lsb-discuss] Perl in LSB 3.2 - RFC

[Stew Benedict]

Just to keep this going, as we we kind of ran into a time crunch at the 
F2F.

I think I heard a pretty strong message that just specifying 
/usr/bin/perl, /usr/bin/python is not going to be adequate.

The big ISVs sound like they will probably ship their own 
perl,python,java, etc. for some time, regardless of what we do, as they 
have too much at stake to depend on the distribution install.

So, to re-ask the question Mats posed before. Is the the type of path I've 
been going down for perl (python would be roughly similar), going to 
address the problem ISVs have with perl, python not being in the LSB?

That is, specifying a minimum version, the location of the interpreter, 
and a list of required modules. which at this point, for perl anyway are 
only things that come out of the base perl tarball, nothing from CPAN, 
etc.

http://www.linux-foundation.org/~stewb/lsb-perl/perlspec/

The list of modules above still being open to some change. I've excluded 
things not really related to Linux, and got some feedback on the Perl side 
about some modules in that list that have been removed in 5.9.x, which I 
should probably remove. There's also a question of whether threads support 
should be mandatory or if we wrap some words around that as something that 
may be present. At least one distribution ships perl without threads.

I still have a few hundred tests to patch to reflect this module list 
which has expanded from the first couple of passes. So before I burn too 
many cycles on this and before we ask the Perl Foundation to create a 
normative spec for us, I want to make sure we're really addressing 
the perceived problem with the languages not being part of the LSB.

-- 
Stew Benedict
The Linux Foundation