[lsb-discuss] Scanning interfaces and LSB 4.0

Theodore Tso tytso at mit.edu
Mon Jul 21 05:44:57 PDT 2008


On Mon, Jul 21, 2008 at 10:37:49AM +0100, Chris Lee wrote:
> This is all good but LSB is starting to make Linux look worse than 
> Windows, in the Linux world you usually install just what you need on a 
> system, on windows you get most of it but some you can add if you need 
> it. I think LSB is going to have to start specifying sub parts that can 
> be "required" by ISVs and installed only if required.
> So an ISV says we need LSB scanning support for our app you install the 
> scanning section provided by the LSB compliant distro.
> I may have missed that the LSB works like that already but it is not 
> obvious to me.

One of the things which we do worry about is what it does to the
required installed size of an LSB compliant system when we add some
new library requirement.  We have to balance this against the
complexity of either having an "LSB desktop" versus "LSB server"
profile.  (Since traditionally all many server applications end up
requiring a GUI to configure themselves, even if it is run across the
network; now many server applications are going to web-based
configuration, so maybe that's less of a consideration.)  Also if
you're not on the network, having to scramble for a distro
installation CD in order to install some optional component can be
very annoying.

I've been assured that in the case of SANE, it is possible to split
the package so that library components that provide the interfaces is
very small, and the backend drivers could be kept in a separate
package that would only be loaded if there were scanners directly
hooked up to the system.

For LSB 4.0 this doesn't help us much, though, since it is designed to
be targetted at currently shipping enterprise distributions and as far
as I know most distributions do *not* split up SANE in this way when
they packaged it.  And even for the next version of the LSB, which
will target the next generation of enterprise distro's, the time
window when we can influence how SANE will be packaged is closing
fast.

So it may be that given this concern, even if we do get SANE fully
documented, that we may end up deciding that we need to ship it as a
trial use module for LSB 4.0.  And regardless, we should definitely
try hard to influence distributions to break up their SANE packaging
so that the library and the backend drivers are separated, so that
this doesn't become a problem for the next generation of
distributions.

Regards,

						- Ted



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