[lsb-discuss] LSB depends on upstream-unmaintained Qt 3

Robert Schweikert rschweikert at novell.com
Wed Mar 2 15:03:42 PST 2011



On 03/02/2011 03:14 PM, Till Kamppeter wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> at Ubuntu there came up a discussion now about moving Qt 3 from the 
> commercially supported (by Canonical) Main section to the unsupported 
> Universe section, pulling also the LSB compatibility package "lsb" down 
> to Universe. This would mean that a standard installation or an 
> installation of a support customer of Canonical (these installations do 
> not have Universe in their set of package download sources) would not be 
> able to install commercial applications provides as LSB packages and 
> also not automatically downloaded printer driver packages from 
> OpenPrinting. The former is mainly an issue for the enterprise user with 
> Canonical support and the latter for the "works out-of-the-box" desktop 
> experience.
> 
> I understand that the Ubuntu developer community and also Canonical do 
> not want to support a complex GUI library package which is not 
> maintained upstream. But now the problem occurs. Other distros will 
> perhaps also think like Canonical and get rid of the load of maintaining 
> Qt3 and with that drop the LSB.
> 
> How should we go on with the LSB when it produces with every version a 
> bigger and bigger ballast of old libraries and packages which distros 
> have to include and maintain while appropriate upstreams drop 
> maintaining this old stuff?
> 
> Would one perhaps need some central pseudo-upstream keeping the source 
> of the old libraries and doing security fixes do avoid either duplicate 
> effort by the distros or distros droppingf LSB support?
> 
As Mats has already pointed out, Qt3 is marked as deprecated. If I
recall the deprecation policy correctly we should be able to drop Qt3
with LSB 4.2 (whenever that may be released).

A distribution is certainly free to choose to certify to LSB or not. If
any given distribution decides that it is better for them not to certify
because the distribution wants to drop packages that are required by the
LSB, then the distro is certainly free to do so. I am not in favor of
bending our policies that ISVs depend on based on the decisions made by
any one distribution.

Both RHEL 6 and SLES 11 will support Qt3 for their life cycle which is
another 5+ years. This is not to say that Qt3 will not disappear from
the LSB for 5+ years, just making the point that this is not an issue
for the leading enterprise distributions.

Later,
Robert
-- 
Robert Schweikert                           MAY THE SOURCE BE WITH YOU
Novell-IBM Software Integration Center                LINUX
Tech Lead
rschweikert at novell.com
rschweikert at ca.ibm.com
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