[lsb-discuss] Linux Application Checker impressions

Theodore Tso tytso at mit.edu
Sat Aug 9 12:28:36 PDT 2008


On Sat, Aug 09, 2008 at 12:45:10PM -0600, Wichmann, Mats D wrote:
> 1. we've been told there are developers who aren't allowed
> root access to their boxes to do package installations, and
> must go begging to their IT people to get anything like that
> to happen; thus a desire to have a mechanism where you can
> just unpack files in your directory and use them.

That means we'll probably always distribute things both ways; maybe
we'll have some other approach that is simpler for developers w/o root
access (i.e., self-extracting shell archive format, etc.)  The point
is to eliminate any barriers for ISV application programmers.

> 2. while distros are able to provide the LSB environment,
> if they don't, the failure mode of LSB binaries is very
> complete and very non-intuitive, something like:
> 
> bash: No such file or directory
> 
> Referring, in fact, to the absence of the linker, not
> the program binary. I notice recent Fedora is now giving
> a much better error message:
> 
> bash: labappchk: /lib64/ld-lsb-x86-64.so.3: bad ELF interpreter:
> No such file or directory
> 
> If that was universally the message this point could go away.

This should also be solved with Jeff's "best efforts dynamic linking"
feature for LSB 4.0.

The other thing that may help here is packaging the RPM's in a yum
repository, which should help for Red Hat and SuSE users, and maybe a
pre-coverted apt repository for Ubuntu and Debian users, since then
the distro tools will take care of dependencies for us automatically.
The goal once again is to eliminate things that might make life
difficult for ISV application programmers from trying our tools....

BTW, one thing we also will need to make sure is the case is that the
Linux Application Checker is only using perl modules which are
guaranteed by the LSB, or we will need to include those CPAN modules
in our distribution ourselves.

	      	  	      		       	      - Ted



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