[lsb-discuss] LSB and the GNU build system

Dallman, John john.dallman at siemens.com
Tue Jul 1 03:23:34 PDT 2008


This may be stunningly naïve: For a sequence of historical reasons, 
I have never become closely familiar with the GNU build system. If 
I'm talking nonsense, just tell me. 

My employers produce some products that use a lot of LGPL open-source 
libraries. Many of these are not built as part of the main product 
builds, which use in-house build systems; instead, they're built with 
the GNU build system, and the resulting libraries are then stored as 
binary components in the source-management system. Building these 
binary components is not something that is done every week, and is 
not the subject of attention from high-powered people; it's a technician
sort of a job. 

This means that the idea of making these components LSB-compliant in
their Linux builds, as a necessary step towards making the products as
a whole LSB-compliant, does not have a whole load of traction. It needs
somebody to modify all those separate instances of the build system,
and to do it again when we get updated source packages. Not an appealing
idea to development managers with limited resources to work with, who
are still trying to understand why the different flavours of Linux aren't
automatically binary-compatible. 

But there's an obvious way to do an end run round the problem: should
the GNU build system have options for building LSB-compliant libraries? 

-- 
John Dallman
Parasolid Porting Engineer

Siemens PLM Software
46 Regent Street, Cambridge, CB2 1DP
United Kingdom
Tel: +44-1223-371554
john.dallman at siemens.com
www.siemens.com/plm




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