[lsb-discuss] What id driving the current ISO hype?

[Vladimir Rubanov]

Well, LSB workgroup is definitely much more "robust" on the LSB topic 
than ISO is. And looking from the inside of the specific ISO SC22 
committee I would note that nobody there is going to do any war with LSB 
workgroup or make any deviations or ... do any actual work on the 
standard :). They would either delegate working on the standard to 
proper experts (which is LSB workgroup now) or just discard it.

Vladimir.
--
Vladimir Rubanov, Ph.D., PMP
VP Engineering and Deputy CEO
ROSA Software Development Center
Mob.: +7-916-117-25-28
http://rubanov.pro/
http://rosalab.ru/


5 Август 2012 г. 1:21:44, Theodore Ts'o писал:
>
> On Fri, Aug 03, 2012 at 02:34:46PM -0400, Robert Schweikert wrote:
>>
>>>
>>> As a user of the LSB I consider it to be a standard of lower value
>>> *specifically* because it's not an ISO standard, why? It displays
>>> what appears to be a reluctance on the part of the LSB community
>>> to work with other countries to resolve issues that are relevant
>>> to all Linux stakeholders (consumers, industry and government),
>>> and to work on consensus building.
>>
>>
>> Wow, that's a pretty strong statement. However, in a certain light
>> you are correct. The LSB is not a consensus building Standard, and
>> was never intended as such. The LSB is a trailing specification that
>> documents common practice across Linux distributions, with a bent
>> towards the "enterprise distributions".
>>
>> If we were to "prescribe by consensus" what distributions have to
>> implement we'd be out of the picture very quickly as distribution
>> vendors would turn their backs if there were any perception of the
>> LSB trying to prescribe what a Linux distribution should look like.
>
>
> Well... there are some very gentle nudges we can apply via the open
> source process if there are backwards compatibility problems in some
> library's ABI (I'm looking at you libstdc++), that were introduced
> accidentally. But that's the sort of thing where we have to intervene
> before software is ever released, and in most cases, before we've
> tried to standardize that library. And that's because, as Robert has
> very correctly stated, the LSB is a trailing specification.
>
> That's ultimately at the end of the day my biggest problem with the
> ISO process. If some troublemakers at various National Bodies has
> some consensus which decides to require the LSB to require POSIX
> compliance (and there are some good reasons by ISO-head standards
> people for not wanting to have two international standards which are
> almost, but not quite, completely aligned), the Linux community has a
> very high probability of simply ignoring the ISO standard --- just as
> various differences between the Linux run-time environment and POSIX
> have been deliberately ignored for ***decades***.
>
> Way back when, when we had the active help of various multinational
> corporations, it was possible to control the outcome via very careful
> placement of engineers working for those multinational corporations in
> the proper National Bodies to make sure that the outcome would respect
> the decisions already made by the Linux development community.
>
> But #1, this is exactly the same thing Microsoft did when it
> controlled the approval OOXML standard, and you can decide for
> yourself whether the ability to manipulate the ISO standards process
> in this fashion is a good thing or a bad thing --- and #2, there is no
> longer a business case for those multinationals to spend $$$ to make
> sure the outcome can be controlled in such a fashion so we can
> guarantee a result which is friendly and defers to the Linux
> development community.
>
> So the nightmare scenario for us is that ISO decides to "add value" by
> either making changes to the ISO version of the LSB standard to force
> alignment with Posix, based on the consensus of the National Bodies,
> or to try to hold the LSB workgroup with blackmail by voting to
> approve the renewal of the LSB's ISO status only if we make certain
> changes based on the the requests of certain National Bodies.
>
> But honestly, I don't think it's that much of a nightmare, given that
> the Linux devleopment community has ignored one ISO standard, it's not
> that hard for them to ignore another one. And if we publish something
> which is not in sync with the ISO standard --- or rather, if ISO tries
> to publish which is not in sync with what the LSB workgroup publishes,
> I'm quite certain that the LSB workgroup can win the social media war
> with ISO-heads.... in fact, if we do have to engage in a social media
> war with ISO, it might actually enhance the LSB's credibility. :-)
>
> - Ted
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