[lsb-discuss] Don't blame LSB and standards, please: was: Re: Fedora Plasma Product, feedback please

Denis Silakov dsilakov at gmail.com
Tue Apr 1 06:07:31 UTC 2014


On 01.04.2014 02:27, Russ Allbery wrote:
> "Jóhann B. Guðmundsson" <johannbg at gmail.com> writes:
>
>> The problem I'm trying to solve is unification across distributions and
>> applications which I though was clear and I thought this standard was
>> supposed to be solving
> I don't think it is.
>
> At least, as a distribution developer, my impression has always been that
> LSB is primarily aimed at providing a standardized platform that
> third-party commercial application developers can target and be relatively
> assured of being able to run on any Linux distribution.  For the most
> part, the actual workings of the native packages of the distribution were
> out of scope, provided that the interfaces were available to third-party
> software of that sort after installing the lsb package.

That's not completely correct, imho. From what I can see (as a 
distribution developer, too) is that a lot of human resources are spent 
on adopting the same software products for different distributions - 
e.g., preparing patches or just updating spec files or dpkg build 
scripts. Maybe it would be more useful for the Linux community if a 
hundred of people instead of rebuilding Firefox for a hundred 
distributions would work on improving its speed?

And it really helps when upstream code can be compiled in different 
systems without any patches. This source-level compatibility is not 
exactly the LSB area, but source and binary compatibility are highly 
coupled and LSB is able to help here, as well.

I would also note that LSB already provides a significant profit for all 
distribution developers (and in some sense, for application developers, 
too) - this is LSB test suite (a bunch of different test suites, to be 
more precise) that can be easily launched by means of Distribution 
Checker. This test set is one of the biggest one in the Linux world and 
from time to time allows to detect quite tricky issues - I can say this 
on the basis of our practice, we use LSB tests as a part of our QA 
process in ROSA.

I think improvement of the tests is one of the areas where people can 
really help LSB. But at the current state of art there are only several 
people from different distributions who report bugs and provide fixes - 
likely because developing/fixing tests is not "sexy" at all, like it was 
mentioned earlier.

-- 
Regards,
Denis.



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