Slashdot Mirror
Three Major Linux Distributions Certified LSB Compliant
KevinDumpsCore writes "RedHat, Mandrake, and SuSE are now certified LSB compliant!" Here's the announcement on the Free Standards Group's site. The Linux Standards Base (check out these related Slashdot posts) has been working for years to perhaps tame the what-lives-where cross-distro craziness. (Of course, distro makers are under no obligation to comply with the LSB's choices.)
Ok, GREAT now merge Gnome and KDE. I hate it when I cannot easily copy from application to another.
Competition is great, but only to a certain level.
The LSB ought to have that merger as a long time goal. Get the Gnome/KDE guys together more, and eventually... I know they have had discussions, but, where are the actual results.
Let, Gnome 3.0 and KDE 4.0 be the same!!!
I don't see seven layers of API. That's just FUD you are spouting from either the Windows or Berlin camp.
A typical GNOME app makes calls into the GNOME libraries, which are linked at the hip to GTK. GTK directly talks the lowest wirelevel X protocol which gets stuff on the framebuffer.
A KDE app talks to the KDE libraries which are built on Qt. Qt talks Xlib (QT experts feel free to call me an idiot and correct me) which, like GTK, talks directly to the X server.
And if you want to argue that X imposes too much overhead, that is why we have things like the shared memory extension and Xrender.
But NO, window managers must remain ordinary applications, otherwise X turns into something brain damaged like Windows or a Mac.
Democrat delenda est
RPM is just fine for a packaging standard. It does EVERYTHING a packaging system needs to do and none of the bogus crap that consumer friendly monsters like InstallShield do. Deb may very well have a equal featureset but nobody in the commercial world uses it because it is only used on Debian, a non-commercial distro. Since the big need for the LSB is for commercial software packagers.... see the problem? As for the BSD Ports system, it has ZERO to offer in this situation despite being a wonderful system. The BSD ports setup pretty much requires source distribution and the target audience for LSB isn't interested in that.
.deb are entirely seperate issues. Yes rpm needs something like apt to come into popular usage. (ya know, maybe apt would be just the ticket! Now if all of the apt groupies would promote it's use with rpm instead of constantly saying ya gotta go to Debian to get the wonders of apt. Ya, I'm talking about you Taco.)
The apt groupies can't get it into their pointed heads that apt can work just fine with rpms. Apt and
Not that I would ever be insane enough to put apt in a cron job like the typical Debian user, but it does do wonders to solve rpm dependency hell situations.
Democrat delenda est
A typical Debian user would not do this. Good god, that's a recipe for disaster!
"Typical" Debian users are more concerned with stability than they are in "upgrading" constantly.
Says the RIAA: When you EQ, you're stealing bass!
This is the kind of attitude that is keeping Linux out of the mainstream. Consumer friendly crap like InstallShield are exactly what is needed.
Typical installation on installation on Linux...
Download rpm and try to install. Now go look for the dependency rpm needed. Download that and try to install. Oops, that has a dependency, too. Can't find an rpm, get the source in a tar.gz. Unpack it and run ./configure, make, make install. Oops, need the source for a missing library. Go find that....
Typical install using InstallShield...
Run InstallShield, choose directory, choose components (though the defaults are usually correct for the average user). Wait for install to finish. Sometimes reboot (yuck, that's stupid).
Now which method is a typical computer user going to prefer?
-- Will program for bandwidth
Certification has little to do with being bloated. It has to do with compatibility. Compatibility sometimes aids to bloatedness because you have to support both new and old. Look how big XP is vs NT 2000, a good deal of bloat is to get the Win95 kernel stuff working. Even with all that bloat, there is stuff that doesn't work. Microsoft isn't certified, and it can break things as it pleases, sometimes intentionally.
/etc/rc{1,2,3,4,5,6}.d but called /MyReallyCoolStartupDir/runlevel/{un,deux, trois...}. I doubt if most software would work though. If you want to make your mark on your install, go ahead. There's plenty of stuff you can do. There's just some stuff you should leave where others can find it.
Linux certification has less to do with forward and reverse compatibility than across distros. Testing's a bitch. Last professional project I did on Linux, we had to support 3 different startup models: Slack 3 and inittab, SVR4, and RedHat SVR4 where they moved the rc?.d directories. (granted this was a long time ago and all may have changed since). Because it's a pain to test for 3 different distros, most folks only do 1, and they might as well do the biggest, and that's RedHat. Slack was dropped, and Mandrake was a one time deal. The group that contracted us said screw these other distros, we'll just support RedHat.
The reason for certification is to get more software. If I can target one installation file, one file system layout, then I'm more likely to make software for that. The easier it is for me to support you, the more likely I am to do so.
Yes the user is free to do whatever they want. You could make it where your startup directory isn't