LSB to Provide Standards as Optional Modules

An anonymous reader writes "The LSB will begin providing certain standards as optional modules to the core LSB standard that will enable standards flexibility and allow for a wider variety of standards, eWeek is reporing Free Standards Group officials said at the OSDL Enterprise Linux Summit today. The article goes on to say that the FSG is also looking at possibly franchising out the application certification component of the LSB to the distribution providers themselves."

Comments

Because evolution works.

[copponex]

Yeah, yeah. I wish I could force a packaging system on all the distros at one time. On the other hand, whatever packaging system does become the "optional standard" will be the best one out there, or at least the best combination of security/stability and ease of use.

Do you know how many mail handling programs there are? Do you know how many are actually popular? Sendmail used to be the only choice, but now a lot of people use qmail.

Give this GUI Linux desktop stuff some time to mature. In five years, nothing else will compare, no matter what the price.

Re:Because evolution works.

[bonch]

Give this GUI Linux desktop stuff some time to mature. In five years, nothing else will compare, no matter what the price.

That's what people five years ago were saying.

I am fully convinced now that Linux will never mature on the desktop due to the very nature of OSS. There are no global standards or goals. Instead, toolkits compete with each other, entire desktops compete, packaging systems compete, and so on. That's nice if you want to preach about "choice" but it won't get you anywhere with a powerful, standardized GUI for the masses, if that is indeed what the goal is. The kind of polish and consistency required to succeed on the desktop is so far away from today's hacky KDE/GNOME-on-top-of-an-X11-protocol desktop environment emulators that it's still a chore just to drag a window around without it tearing up on the screen.

It's sad, because when Linux desktops first came out in the 90s, there was great potential, but I've watched the directions they've taken (look like Windows but with 10x the buttons and sidebars!) and shaken my head. They should have based everything around a standard such as an evolved GNUStep and beaten OS X to the gate back in the late 90s. But that's not how it happened at all.

The motivation in the OSS world is that of scratching an itch. That is a vague, unreliable mantra to rely on. In the commercial world, however, developers have financial incentive to polish up and finish every last detail to complete the user experience, and they are under the reigns of team leaders who make sure everyone follows a single vision, right or wrong, rather than argue and debate endlessly about different ways to do things. Think about it. Darwin/Aqua is a totally new thing that took them about five years, drawing from the same kind of open resources available to Linux at the time. In five years, they had a completely new OS shipped and ready. On the other hand, Linux has been around for an entire decade now, and the desktops still look like they're competing with Windows 98 in a non-accelerated, 2D world of "Start" menus and taskbars. Even Longhorn is finally utilizing a new display format to compete with OS X's PDF via Avalon. Hell, NextStep was using Postscript in the 80s.

A desktop succeeds when it is truly seamless and integrates all of its technologies. OS X has already accomplished that using the same kinds of resources available to Linux, such as OSS and BSD software. Windows finally got there with the NT code and its abandonment of DOS. Linux is still trying to figure out how to have it so users don't have to install TWO ENTIRE DESKTOP ENVIRONMENTS just to run all the apps available. I don't know what it is about OSS interfaces that make them suck, as there is plenty of freeware OSS available for Windows and OS X that looks gorgeous and is a joy to use. I can only presume it's the development environments and developer attitudes.

Linux is fun to play with for me, but I would use it as a server alongside the BSDs. It is far, far, FAR from ready being a mainstream, accessible desktop to bring computing to the masses. The community attitude is simply not in the right place to cater to users (right now, users are often looked-down upon as nuisances who complain to much rather than pristine sources of human-computer-interface feedback). There's simply no academic or artistic approach to bringing a mainstream desktop to users in this community. It's all about "Micro$haft is doing this? Well, we'll do that but with five more buttons and the ability to move it anywhere on screen!" There's a distinct lack of taste or culture to the desktop offerings, though the least bad I've used would be Gnome.

Just my opinion.

Bad idea....

[Kjella]

...let's see now. You have a fringe OS (at least in the desktop space), with a bunch of incompatible standards (deb, non-lsb rpm, ebuild etc.) and instead of actually getting one standard used (how many USE lsb packages?) they're going to make more?

At most, they should have TWO - LSB-server and LSB-desktop. Not a "LSB-foo-bar packet" which doesn't run on a "LSB-foo" machine. The rest? Forget it.

Kjella

You've hit the core problem.

[khasim]

However, while having optional modules for the standard doesn't seem like a bad thing to me, the idea of having the distibution providers doing the certification seems like a mistake.

Bingo. What incentive does Red Hat have to ensure LSB compliance in addition to (or instead of) Red Hat compliance?

The original stated purpose of the LSB was to guarantee that an app you got from an ISV who had certified that app against the LSB would run on any LSB compliant system.

If Red Hat certifies an ISV's app against the LSB implementation that Red Hat has, where is the guarantee that the app will run on a Debian LSB system? Or even a SuSE LSB system?

In which case, you're back at the beginning with the "problem" that a package built for Red Hat will not be guaranteed to run on a SuSE box.