[lsb-discuss] Why was RPM chosen as part of LSB? (was Re: Why python was chosen as a part of LSB?)

Jeffrey Johnson n3npq at me.com
Fri Jun 13 15:18:34 UTC 2014


On Jun 13, 2014, at 8:00 AM, lsb-discuss-request at lists.linux-foundation.org wrote:

> 
> On Wed, Jun 11, 2014 at 02:31:34AM +0300, Net Kgk wrote:
>> Ruby is popular. Perl is popular. Javascript is popular. Any
>> programing language, if it has some practical use is popular and have
>> some community, so why chose only one of them?
>> As far as I know, javascript is the most popular scripting language
>> ever. Besides it is much more readable and faster than python. So why
>> python? Just because of the fact that some distros like RedHat and
>> Gentoo was so stupid to chose python as programming language for their
>> packaging systems? Why not use Suse experience, then? Is it worst, or
>> something?
> 
> Perhaps you're not aware of the LSB's primary goal --- which was not
> to annoint one or more languages as willing some perceived "Language
> War", but rather to promote the ability for third-party distributed
> software packages (particularly those that were shipping compiled
> binaries) to be usable across multiple distributions.
> 

There are no licensing restrictions on RPM code and tests exist for RPM.

Surely all ISV's -- those funding LSB or not -- benefit from a "standard" software
distribution format.

Meanwhile you (as former CTO of LSB) are recommending that rpm packages 
should be in a format that was abandoned and is nowhere in use. The LSB
infrastructure is offering a perl script to produce rpm packages because
the existing specification and tests are too weak to attempt an implementation.

The number of LANANA registered "lsb-" names is of order 20 when typical distros
are composed of thousands of *.rpm packages.

And LSB itself doesn't provide software packages conformant to the
	LSB Package Spec

LSB has punted the uplift of the LSB packaging spec for 2 full release cycles now
(LSB 4.x and 5.0).

LSB has also rejected a FL/OSS implementation of the
"Berlin API", designed and promoted by Ian Murdock (and presumably LSB) itself.

So why was RPM chosen to be included in the LSB Core specification?

73 de Jeff
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