[lsb-discuss] LSB conf call notes for 2008-06-11

[Jeff Licquia]

Attendees: Jeff Licquia, Ron Hale-Evans, George Kraft, Dan Kohn, Mats 
Wichmann, Carlos Duclos, Russ Herrold, Stew Benedict, Vladimir Rubanov, 
Alexey Khoroshilov, Robert Schweikert, Alan Clark, Ted Tso.

3.2 refresh beta 2.

3.2 SI.  Stew: s390 problem, rebuilding now.  Jeff: beta time.  Alexey: 
bug in SI: no fonts.  Stew: should this be a showstopper for the SI? 
Ted: maybe a new feature?  Alexey: some apps won't run in the absence of 
fonts.  Ted: problem with taking time on 3.2.  Jeff: maybe provide a 
font package as an add-on for the SI, to prevent rebuilding?  Seems like 
the consensus.  Stew will look into doing that; won't hold up the beta 
waiting for it.

4.0 symbol list from Mats.  Jeff: worth discussing these, so we can make 
decisions and act.

ptrace.  Ted: why do people use it in a non-debugging environment? 
Robert: language implementors.  Ted: problem is that ptrace is different 
per-arch; lots of work.  Mats: Google performance toolkit (which seems 
to come up a lot).  Sun has been trying to kill ptrace.  Ted: ptrace 
like ioctl, painful to specify.  Jeff: original bug filed from wine. 
Ted: wine/CrossOver isn't going to be LSB-compiant anytime soon.  Mats: 
google perf tools uses it to clean up threads on a signal.  Ted: could 
we pull someone in?  Jeff will ask Dan Kegel for someone to discuss 
ptrace.  Ted: also discuss syscall, gettid, possible other "evil" 
interfaces.

dl_iterate_phdr.  Lots of apps use it: avg, f-secure, vmware, java, 
google earth, google desktop, groupwise, adobe reader.  Mats: not used 
in google performance tools currently (claimed bug).  Jeff: noted that 
it's Linux-specific; any other objections?  Mats: std. objection: need 
an accurate spec.  Ted: stable?  Jeff: seems to be, latest change dates 
back to glibc 2.2.5.  Add?  Mats not sure he knows the whole story. 
Ted: odd, but seems useful.

dlinfo.  No docs?  Ted: concern is the tie to the dynamic linker.  Jeff: 
only request is internal; no apps use it.  Maybe skip?  Mats: makes sense.

Xext*.  Mats: used by a lot of apps.  Not documented, require a 
structure that's really ugly.  Ted: can we wrte a wrapper that doesn't 
expose the structure.  Mats: most extension libs have a query function; 
this is something else.  Java uses it for their self-tests.  Ted: maybe 
we tell the X people "write a new ABI, or we'll standardize the regular 
one".  Also, so many people are using it that it's a de-facto standard 
already.  Robert agrees.  Ted: add as deprecated?  Jeff will send a note 
to the X folks regarding this issue.  Robert: cross-post to lsb-discuss.

strverscmp.  Used by a few apps.  Ted: low cost.

alphasort/scandir.  Discrepancy between POSIX/history and the glibc 
spec.  Need a test of some kind to see if glibc can take the more 
precise version.  Ted: check with glibc tip as well.