[lsb-discuss] Ok im confused .... (LSB Certification of distro)

[Mats Wichmann]

On 02/03/2014 01:35 PM, Jeff Licquia wrote:
> On 02/03/2014 06:29 AM, Gregory H. Nietsky wrote:
>> Seems my kung fu is weak ...
> 
> Or our documentation kung-fu is weak. :-)

I'm afraid it has rotted, there actually was a fair bit at one point.

In theory, anyway, making a distro LSB conforming is fairly easy, though
sometimes some of the details make it less so.

First you need to figure out which packages need to be installed to
provide the LSB environment (that is, all the required libraries and
commands).

Then you need a way to make reproducing that easy for your users.
Usually people do that by building a package which is either empty and
just depends on the appropriate packages, or possibly supplies some
interesting extra bits like lsb_release and the LSB linker (those could
of course also be in a dependent package).  There's no rule for the
actual details.  But this package should be the one that "provides"
lsb=5.0 (or whatever target(s) you're shooting at).

Some simple checkers go a long way to making sure you have the right
pieces figured out - lsblibchk for libraries and lsbcmdchk for commands.

There's an overall testing tool which drives checking out the whole
thing - lsb-dist-checker.  That can run the two checkers listed above,
plus a whole lot of rather more intensive runtime tests.  Usually
sorting out those details is where it gets a little less pleasant (sorry).

Yes, the lsb_release package has kind of fallen into a bit-rot state.
LSB long ago moved off SourceForge.  The last maintained version of the
sample turns out to be here:

http://bzr.linuxfoundation.org/loggerhead/lsb/devel/si/files

The Sample Implementation (si) was abandoned due to disuse and no
resources, but we are due to do some work on the lsb_release sample
itself to support some of the rearranging that happened for LSB 5.0.