The LSB Delivers Again

gk4 writes "The LSB has updated and published the gLSB v1.1 draft for review. The LSB has also published for review the new psLSB for IA32 v1.1 draft and the completed LSB v1.0.1 Test Suites. Review ends Friday January 4th; however, the LSB welcomes comments from the community at any time."

Comments

An RPM Standard

[finity]

So RPM is now the "standard?" I'm not sure I like that. RPM is great and all, and many distros use it or at least can handle them, but I think maybe it should be refined a little more. I like debian's package manager as it is easy to use and fairly straightforward. I know RPM is supposed to be that way as well, but I've had a lot more dependency problems with RPMs than I have with apt.

Re:LSB is not a standard

[Jason Earl]

By that logic the GNU tar maintainer shouldn't have included the -z flag either because you could always pipe the output from tar through gzip. The -E flag for cat was almost certainly added for the same reason that many commandline flags are added to GNU software. It was easy to add, and it makes the software a little easier to use. Why in the world would I want to use sed to put a '$' at the end of the line when I can simply do cat -E?

I also think that the LSB is fundamentally flawed, but not because it specifies GNU software (complete with their various and sundry GNUisms). The LSB is flawed because it isn't self hosting. In other words there really isn't a good way to know that your binary application is LSB compliant. You can't just install the LSB onto some test machine and bang away on it. They are working on a test script that hopefully will eventually allow you to check for compliance but currently the README states:

There is not yet a complete set of official test suites released by the LSB that can be used for compliance testing. You can download unoffical development versions of test suites planned to be used in the future from the beta directory in the directory above.

And if that isn't bad enough, the LSB isn't a particularly exciting platform to port to. Most of the cool new Linux features are not included. Basically the LSB is Linux with all of the joy sucked out. No wonder commercial vendors simply test against RedHat and call it good. It simply doesn't make sense to do anything else.

Re:LSB is not a standard

[Arandir]

By that logic the GNU tar maintainer shouldn't have included the -z flag either because you could always pipe the output from tar through gzip.

You completely missed the point. Standards need to be lowest common denominator. Having a -z flag in GNU tar is damn useful. But it should not be the standard.

There are standards for most Unix utilities, and those standards should have been used instead of the mandating the GNU extensions.

Re:"L" is the problem

[Wesley Felter]

Standardizing Unix has been tried; the results were things like POSIX and the Single Unix Spec. They cost millions to develop and didn't completely solve the portability problem. Why try again?