[lsb-discuss] LSB half walk between distro and not distro.

Wichmann, Mats D mats.d.wichmann at intel.com
Thu Mar 13 07:03:13 PDT 2008


Peter Dolding wrote:
> Currently LSB covered libs are far to limited for a lot of
> applications.   Yet not all lib's are going to be needed by all
> applications.
> 
> I do support for the www.winehq.org project.  It would be a great
> break threw if the project could stop making packages for every distro
> out there.

Hi Peter - thanks for chiming in!  We had some talks several years 
back (with Dan) about Wine and LSB, and it eventually became clear
it was too early then.

You've raised a lot of interesting issues, not all of which I
was aware of except in general terms (like security).  It would
be interesting if you could make some proposals how one could
proceed. 

As you probably know, LSB is not the kind of standards effort 
which tries to invent a solution and tell people they need to
follow it (yes, yes, I know one can find a few counter examples,
but they're very small in the scheme of things).  Usually what
needs to happen is people who are affected by an issue have to
get together and hammer out something.  The xdg-utils effort
is an example of one that worked out pretty well - there are
now ways for a desktop application to do some common things
in a manner that's independent of the desktop in use.  With that
gaining acceptance, we've been able to put it into LSB (for
3.2 it's Trial Use, which means it's not fully required yet).

There are several ways to bring out these issues and get them
more attention.  One venue could be the Desktop Architects
Meeting which will be part of Linux Foundation's Collaboration
Summit next month.  I admit I haven't paid that much attention,
do you know if Wine folks are plugged in to that this year?
If I'm not wrong there have been people involved with Wine
at DAM in past years.

I don't know about this "end of Distros as we know it" :-) -
let's not be too incendiary, shall we?   I think it would
take a lot for distros to stop packaging so much, I would
always think the issue of trust would come out ("how could we
trust all of these packages coming from some source we have
no control over - guess who gets the support call?"). 
Given that's probably not a goal - certainly not at this stage - 
is there serious progress that could be made to help developers?




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