[lsb-discuss] ISV perspective in response to April 13 conf call

Wichmann, Mats D mats.d.wichmann at intel.com
Thu Apr 21 05:18:23 PDT 2011


Craig.Scott at csiro.au wrote:
> Considering the visibility aspect of the LSB, the LSB website
> is not really doing you guys any favours in terms of structure
> within the linuxfoundation site. On a whim, I pointed my
> browser at www.lsb.org to see if that would take me somewhere
> sane, but I got a fairly crude redirection message that took
> me to the LSB part of the linuxfoundation site. That's one set
> of points lost. When I got there, all the menu bar links,
> sidebar links and footer links were generic and pretty much
> not related to the LSB. There were a few links within the body
> of the page itself, but for something like the LSB which
> wants/needs visibility, this is starting the user from a less
> than ideal point of enquiry. There's a lot of screen real
> estate being used for things not related to the LSB.....

This is an (extremely) sore point.  Let's say LSB "lost an
argument" about LF homogenization, and then a promising site
for information (the Linux Developer Network, or LDN) failed
to gather momentum (or even maintenance, for reasons not worth
rehashing now).  "Useless website" has been a curse for many
years which individual developers have been unable to affect
a change for.

> Regarding the "what are we missing" question, for us it is
> getting less about the technical impediments and more about
> the learning/resourcing. Writing code such that an app can be
> made LSB compliant is getting under control (for us it's now
> at the point where we rarely have issues on that front).
> Getting compliant RPM's built took a lot more work than it
> should have and to me, it still feels like the barrier to
> doing the things users expect (eg desktop integration,
> handling add/remove/startup of services, handling .deb-based
> systems) is too high for many people to bother. There are too
> many gotchas and quirky things that can go wrong. Some of
> these are just as hard on other platforms, but it is one area
> where we have lost much time in the past, often for what
> appears to be "nice to haves" rather than "die without them" features.

I can't argue with these... not that I set out to argue I mean,
but rather that we do know there's a lot of "polish" missing,
and even more documentation.  There was once even an LSB
book, which was published in hardcover, but also put up as
an online copy, which pulled a lot of things together as they
stood at that time.  Unfortunately that didn't stay current either.

> Having packages that are too old is another area that can
> catch us out, but we've essentially dealt with the majority of
> those by bundling our own more recent version of Qt with our
> packages. That has required working with Nokia to get patches
> in (work still ongoing). Most people won't go that far, we
> just decided to bite the bullet for ourselves and I had a
> personal interest. Most people will either work out how to not
> use/require the newer stuff in their own code, or more likely
> decide the LSB is too out of date to bother with.

Okay, fair enough.





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