[lsb-discuss] Summit Discussion and Tasks

[Jeff Licquia]

At the Linux Foundation Summit last week, the LSB workgroup spent some
time with Desktop Architects, and also met on its own.  During its own
session, several issues were identified, and some tasks were doled out.
Here is a summary of the tasks, and their owners as of the meeting.

The ISV panel did not identify any specific tasks.  Instead, it
highlighted a few issues the LSB workgroup should keep in mind: the
differences between "consumer" ISVs with broad appeal, such as Adobe,
and "vertical" ISVs with few but large deployments; and understanding
how different ISVs work on different timetables.

Tasks coming out of the meeting:

 - There is a question of making Qt 4 mandatory; it's on our roadmap,
but may also be controversial.  Stew is looking at this.

 - There are likely more missing interfaces in the LSB, specifically in
the core.  Sam was evaluating several large applications to identify
some of those, and will continue doing so.

 - The functionality in the old lsbinstall utility needs to be brought
in under some mechanism (where it hasn't already been introduced by way
of xdg-utils).  Tentatively, Mats was given this task, although he
wasn't present at the time.

 - As part of the path towards supporting Java in the LSB, we need a
LSB-certified JRE.  Ted T'so and Ian Murdock plan to start this project
by finding the right people to pursue it.

 - Several people have expressed interest in an embedded profile of the
LSB.  This is being pursued by the Mobile working group.

 - As part of the embedded profile, adding the ARM platform to the LSB
will be needed.  John Mehaffey of MontaVista will be starting this work.

 - The Accessibility workgroup proposed a set of additions to the LSB at
the meeting: better tests of ATK, and adding the IDL from the ATSPI spec
as a normative source for the LSB.  Stew will be overseeing the
evaluation of these proposals.

 - The Linux kernel developers have proposed adding support for some
direct kernel interfaces, such as /proc, to the LSB.  Jeff and Dan Kohn
will be talking to the kernel folks (probably Greg KH, specifically)
about what to add, and getting feedback about what would be useful.

 - At the Packaging Summit in Berlin last year, we proposed an API for
interfacing to package managers from third-party software installers.
The need for this API was re-emphasized at the Summit.  Seth Vidal from
Red Hat and Jeff will work to ensure a cross-package API gets done.

 - Better integration with a good development environment was identified
as an important hook for attracting ISVs that are currently
Windows-focused.  The ISPRAS team will be producing an Eclipse plugin in
the near future which we intend to address this need.

An additional task, not assigned at the Summit, is to evaluate the
proposal from the Open Printing workgroup to add GhostScript, some of
CUPS, and a few other printing-related items to the LSB.