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Sat Nov 26 22:11:05 UTC 2011


> While the enterprise distributions are the basis for the primary target
> "customers" of the LSB, third party software developers, it has been
> learned that the enterprise distributions do not re-certify a given
> release series to a newer LSB release. Therefore, the previous practice
> that caused the LSB to trail very far behind the leading edge will be
> abandoned for the next LSB release. This was a decision reached at the
> LSB F2F Spring 2011 meeting. For this next release the target is to
> strike a middle ground between "chasing" ever evolving community
> distributions, anticipating potential technology expected in the next
> enterprise distributions, and trying to make reasonable judgments about
> needs of the target "customers".

I'm an archetypical example of those target customers: LSB already suits
what I do quite well, and makes my life far easier in supporting customers
running unexpected versions of Linux. While this description sounds good,
I'm unclear as to what it will mean in practice. Some specific questions:

"anticipating potential technology expected in the next enterprise
distributions" seems to be fraught with peril. If a particular enterprise
distribution feels that some new technology is not adequately reliable, or
doesn't wish to support it for other reasons, then it being required by
a new LSB version is not going to change the distributor's mind. They will
just stay on their previous LSB standard, or even drop LSB compliance. This
policy seems to make continued acceptance of the LSB by distributions depen=
d
on the LSB team never making a serious error in anticipation. And that
anticipation can't be entirely driven by technical issues: political and
personal aspects within the distributor will also play a role, and they
are very hard to anticipate.

How will the forwards and backwards compatibility of LSB releases be manage=
d
under this new system? Currently, I am shipping LSB 3.1 compliant software,
because I expect that to be supported as far as LSB 6.0, and some of my
customers are still using SLES10 and RHEL5, which aren't certified for LSB
4.x. If the LSB standards are going to start moving forwards on the
technology paths more rapidly, will the previously announced forwards
compatibility rules be maintained?

Will the old versions of GCC that ship with enterprise distributions be
supported? I ship libraries, rather than complete applications, and I find
that customers are prone to FUD unless they can access exactly the same
compiler as I use. So I stick with the ones that come with the distribution=
s.

thanks,

--
John Dallman


-----Original Message-----
From: lsb-discuss-bounces at lists.linux-foundation.org [mailto:lsb-discuss-bo=
unces at lists.linux-foundation.org] On Behalf Of Robert Schweikert
Sent: 03 February 2012 20:21
To: lsb-discuss at lists.linux-foundation.org
Subject: [lsb-discuss] LSB 5.0 Road map -- It's a start

All,

As promised I will be driving the roadmap discussion that will hopefully
lead us to a plan for the next release. To this effect I have made an
attempt to categorize information we had previously collected.

I have updated the ProjectPlan page
(https://wiki.linuxfoundation.org/en/ProjectPlan50) page listing our
potential objectives for the next release based on my interpretation of
discussions we've had previously.

For each potential objective I have added the next tasks that need to be
completed in order to proceed. I have assigned completion dates to these
tasks.

I have also pruned the project plan off any comments that are not
directly related to the listed objectives. Anything removed is now
available in the Parkinglot
(https://wiki.linuxfoundation.org/en/Parkinglot50).

Some items in the Parkinglot are somewhat related to the potential
objectives and may turn into tasks once we decide what our objectives
truely are. Other items in the parking lot may already have a place on
the uplift page (https://wiki.linuxfoundation.org/en/Uplift_Target)
page. The uplift page now contains our uplift target summary, some
general considerations for uplifts, the proposed additions,
deprecations, and drops. This is basically already set up as a task list
and as we decide on the fate on each entry in the various tables we can
fill in our decision and "dole" out the work ;).

Please review all 3 pages prior to the next meeting.

Jeff, can you please add an item to Wednesday's agenda to discuss the
setup and the planning process.

Thanks,
Robert

--
Robert Schweikert                           MAY THE SOURCE BE WITH YOU
SUSE-IBM Software Integration Center                   LINUX
Tech Lead
rjschwei at suse.com
rschweik at ca.ibm.com
781-464-8147
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