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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.)
LSB requires compliant distributions to provide, not use, rpm, and Debian does.
It's too bad that the LSB people havn't yet taken on packaging issues. They've effectively chickened out by just recommending RPM. The best features of RPM, DEB and the BSD ports system should be reflected in a new packaging format for people to work towards using. Not only should this format be recommended by the LSB, but the LSB should define policies for the use of the format - package name and version formats, dependencies and package alias names, source package handling, non-official packages, etc. This really is necessary to get distribution of commercial software on Linux; testing for and supporting distribution differences is just too expensive for most companies. This is not to say that everyone supporting RPM won't help, but rather that policies are needed to really make it work, and that we may as well get a more optimal package management system happening :)
(http://www.opengroup.org/lsb/cert/cert_prodlist.t pl?CALLER=display_product.tpl)
-Mandrake Linux ProSuite 8.2 + first update CD
-Red Hat Linux 7.3 with glibc 2.2.5-39+kernel 2.4.18-10 or later
-SuSE Linux 8.0 Professional + aaa_base and Kernel Update
--- Brad (http://www.LinuxReview.net)
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
"Hardly used" will not fetch you a better price for your brain.
I have been using apt for rpm (apt4rpm.sf.net) for ages, works insanly well !! resolve de dependency hell !