[lsb-discuss] LSB conf call notes for 2008-08-06

[Jeff Licquia]

Attendees: Jeff Licquia, Stew Benedict, Jesper Thomschultz, Carlos 
Duclos, Ron Hale-Evans, Russ Herrold, Alexey Khoroshilov, George Kraft, 
Vojtech Pavlik, Jiri Dluhos, David Herron, Robert Schweikert

Jeff: introduce David Herron, one of the new Java people.  David: 
Quality lead for Java group.  Dalibor Topic will be the primary contact 
between Java and the LSB.  Ron: because we're referencing the spec, the 
Java spec in the LSB will be simple: "see the Java published standard". 
  There will be a subset of the options for Java specified in the man 
page.  Creating a new module for Java.  David: has been on the mailing 
list for the past few months, has been following the discussion.

David: Would like to look at the docs.  Ron: will get current status by 
the end of the week.  There's a bug in Bugzilla with the SGML.  David: 
hasn't seen the mail.  Ron: will resend, may be connectivity issues.

David: don't have a sense from our team about what changes we need to 
make.  Plan is to simply document what is there now.  Jeff: our old 
plan, before OpenJDK, was to try and get JVM providers to make their JVM 
an LSB-compliant app.  If we add Java to the spec, this is less urgent, 
although some Java app vendors still tie their app to a specific JVM.

TCK issues.  David: the TCK is run by JTHarness; not legal to use 
another harness.  Call JTHarness and tell it to run the TCK; there's a 
documented output format.  Jeff: translate it to TET journals?  David: 
not sure if the rules would allow it, but should be possible from a 
technical perspective.  Still license issues to take care of.  Jeff: 
usability issues.  David: need to sign a Contributor Agreement and 
Trademark Agreement.  Jeff: who would be the right people to get 
involved?  David: Dalibor wouldn't be quite right, but he should have 
the right contacts.  Ray Ganz.  Onno Aluit.  Maybe Dalibor should 
initiate this.  Jeff: can we get a copy of the TCK?  David: Java TCK 
itself is read-only; other TCKs are open source.  Can get access online.

David: there's been a long-standing issue with Java and LSB integration; 
are glad it's finally getting resolved.  Jeff: it seems people have been 
hitting both sides of this problem.

Ron: forwarded the email.

Russ: CentOS cannot ship Java.  David: under GPL.  Russ: indemnification 
is the problem, will go through the license.  Jeff: intent is to make it 
possible to use OpenJDK; not being able to use that would be a 
show-stopper.  Russ: has a problem with part of the TCK license.  Jeff: 
link?  Russ: will send.  (Russ is a lawyer, but is not giving legal 
advice with any of his comments, and does not do so except in a 
confidential attorney-client relationship.)

Packaging.  Russ: some maintenance is better than none.  Three tines on 
the RPM fork is a good thing.  Moves it out of the lead maintainer's 
responsibility.

Vojtech: have run the idea of integrating the SDK into SLES by people at 
Novell, toolchain team.  Reaction was mostly excited.  Great benefit for 
both LSB and SLES 11.  In favor; question is the timing.  Will go into 
beta sometime in November, so need to get something in before that. 
Jeff: beta in September.  Vojtech: that would be good, but a pre-alpha 
preview would be good ASAP.  Would provide as a pattern, so that you'd 
build LSB-compliant binaries by default if installed.  Also, generic 
pattern, which would do things the normal way.  Could have a dialog in 
the workflow to suggest the LSB pattern.  Jeff: snapshots.  Vojtech: 
will look.

Russ: RPM 5 could include the ability to run the LSB tests as part of 
the build process.  Is there interest in this?  Jeff: there may be.