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Linux Standard Effort Edges Ahead

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the for-some-definition-of-ahead dept.

ErikPeterson writes "The Free Standards Group has released its third version of the Linux Standard Base, an effort to unify some of the workings of the open-source operating system. The LSB is designed to make it easier for those producing higher-level software to support different versions of Linux. Pledges to conform to the requirements of Version 3 are Red Hat, Novell's Suse Linux, Asianux and Debian."

31 of 138 comments (clear)

  1. Making progress... by TripMaster+Monkey · · Score: 4, Funny


    Pledges to conform to the requirements of Version 3 are Red Hat, Novell's Suse Linux, Asianux and Debian.

    Four down, only 458 to go.

    --
    ____

    ~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey

    1. Re:Making progress... by tpgp · · Score: 4, Interesting
      Pledges to conform to the requirements of Version 3 are Red Hat, Novell's Suse Linux, Asianux and Debian.
      Four down, only 458 to go.


      I think you are well aware Mr Monkey, that if Debian, Suse and Red Hat commit, the rest will follow (for instance Ubuntu will pick it up naturally next time they snapshot debian unstable).

      On a different note, when I last subsribed to the debian lists (some time ago now), I remember a bit of a flame war over an earlier incarnation of LSB.

      Basically - the argument was over whether the Debian GNU/hurd and Debian GNU/*bsd projects should follow the Linux standard base or just Debian GNU/linux.

      Here's a good (mid thread) post about it.

      Does anyone know if Debian GNU/hurd and Debian GNU/*bsd will follow the LSB3? Or just Debiam GNU/Linux.
      --
      My pics.
    2. Re:Making progress... by Cronopios · · Score: 4, Informative

      Despite the original post, it wasn't Debian who pledged to conform to this standard, but the Debian Common Core Alliance.

      Nor Debian nor Ubuntu are part of it.

      Btw, in a recent post on his blog, Red Hat's Ulrich Drepper makes some criticisms of the LSB and its shortcomings of the v3 certification process.

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    3. Re:Making progress... by ackthpt · · Score: 2, Funny
      Four down, only 458 to go.

      C'mon, you know the only way this stuff will standardize is when Microsoft Linux comes out ;-)

      --

      A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
    4. Re:Making progress... by cranky_slacker · · Score: 2, Interesting

      I think you are well aware Mr Monkey, that if Debian, Suse and Red Hat commit, the rest will follow (for instance Ubuntu will pick it up naturally next time they snapshot debian unstable).

      While I agree that all the derivative distro's will follow suit (like Ubuntu), I really doubt Slackware will adopt something just because Red Hat did. I seem to recall a nice little debate here on /. last week about the necessity/relevance of Slackware when v10.2 was released. The over-riding point I tried to make was that Slack was still relevant and the reason it is, is because Pat follows his own set of standards, namely, simplicity, reliability and stability.

      Personally, I think this whole thing is waste of time until all (or an overwhelming majority) distros adopt them. Until then, it shouldn't even be called a standard. They're guidelines.

  2. Standards by Tomchu · · Score: 4, Insightful

    A standard is a standard when everyone is using it. Just calling it one doesn't make it so.

    --
    I used to think Linux was cool -- then I turned 14.
    1. Re:Standards by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

      Then, by that definition, neither metric nor imperial are standard systems of measurements. Why? Because not everyone is using it.

      You lose. Have a nice day.

    2. Re:Standards by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

      No, that's a de facto standard. We're talking de jure, as in planned and drafted.

    3. Re:Standards by afr0byte · · Score: 5, Informative

      Yeah, and what percentage of Linux usage do these distros encompass? Based on Linux Counter, these distros (including fedora for redhat) encompass 41.31% of users. If Mandrake, for example, jumps on board then that'll be over 50%, a majority. I'm not even counting Asianux, because I couldn't find a number on that.

      --
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    4. Re:Standards by __aajwxe560 · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Whoever flagged you as insightful should be ashamed of themselves. A standard provides a common goal for whomever is interested to work towards. Whether or not the majority work towards the goal does not make it any less of a standard. The short lived DIVX player from Circuit City was a standard, as there exists many different standards for DVDs. Whether or not the majority of devices embrace such a standard does not refute the fact that it exists. Many different types of standards start out in the minority, and many remain so, but they still serve a purpose.
      Anything that promotes some form of application commonality amongst the various Linux distributions certainly cannot be a bad thing.

  3. Package management by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    What the LSB should, imo, do is make autopackage the format of choice for installing applications and then have the default package manager (such as rpms and debs and stuff) to download the dependent libs and keep the base system up-to-date. That way, everyone's happy. The newbies get their easy program installers and the seasoned veterans get their apt. But, alas, it's apparently not to be.

    1. Re:Package management by Benanov · · Score: 2, Informative

      Autopackage isn't quite integrated with the default package manager yet (per their website, http://autopackage.org/) Once that happens I can see that being very likely. ;)

  4. LSB Website by Grey_14 · · Score: 5, Informative

    Why doesn't he blurb link to the LSB website at all? it's here Anyway's.

  5. WOW by TampaDeveloper · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Wow. I'm very happy. LSB might actually make Linux useful for those of us trying to make a living off of software development...

    1. Re:WOW by Miniluv · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Don't get your hopes up. While the LSB appears like a very useful standard, as many have noted there are some real holes, and the test suite is by all accounts utterly useless. Further, there's not as tight of control of the testing so it appears at least some vendors are doing bizarre things to be compliant without waivers, despite tests that don't run in real world situations.
      One example that Ulrich Drepper of RedHat pointed out is the thread test, which won't run on an SMP box. The LSB people's response? Run it on a slow uniprocessor. What's the point of this again?

    2. Re:WOW by Miniluv · · Score: 4, Interesting

      I'm torn on whether a bad standard is actually better than none. I don't think the problems lie so much in the LSBv3 standard itself, as in the poor management of the standard that such a young standards body is having.
      RedHat is really the company which needs to drive this standard, and while so far they've been doing a lot to do so, its not really in their best competitive interests. Consider that all the major "enterprise" products that folks would want on Linux (WebSphere, Oracle, WebLogic, etc) all specify RedHat as their supported distro.
      I think we need to heap scorn on the crappy test suite now, to try and force them to clean up their act before they engender too much negative press and reputation. Once we hit a certain point where the negative reputation builds up, the standard will be doomed forever.

    3. Re:WOW by TampaDeveloper · · Score: 2, Insightful

      I certainly understand why RedHat would see it as a conflict of interest. But I think they need to start thinking about the viability of the Linux community as a whole. There are two MAJOR competitors just now coming up to speed; OpenSolaris and OSX for x86. Then theirs OpenBSD. OpenBSD moves slower than Linux because nobody likes to sit around waiting for quality, but in the Unix race, quality seems to win in the long-haul. So if the leaders in the Linux community can't wrangle things together, I think theres a good chance were just going to see it diverge into obscurity.

    4. Re:WOW by syousef · · Score: 2, Interesting

      A bad standard will ensure everyone suffers and everyone does things equally poorly.

      I'd rather no standard. People are then not pressured into doing stupid things. Eventually the software people judge to be better prevails and becomes a pseudo-standard. If nothing's significantly better than anything else out there I'd still rather we were forced to deal with the headache of incompatibility than have everyone use a system that is bad and will eventually die.

      --
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  6. LSB by gustgr · · Score: 5, Funny

    The article gets funnier when you read LSB as Least Significant Bit.

  7. Release notes by Spy+der+Mann · · Score: 2, Informative

    Here are the LSB 3.0 Release notes. I'd appreciate it if somebody explained if there is a significant or revolution or something. Thank you.

  8. Like it or not ... by b3x · · Score: 4, Insightful

    This sort of thing is a necessity. With the variety of Distros and each having its own idea of where things should be, it leads to a lot of unecessary confusion. Regardless of whether the confusion is legitimate or slightly hyped by bullet points in paid research docs, it exists.

  9. Re:Whose standard? by LnxAddct · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Well considering that Red Hat, Fedora, Novell, and Debian together hold about 3.5 million servers according to netcraft (as of last march), those are the only players that really matter. Red Hat has about 1.8 million, Fedora: 400,000 , Novell: 400,000 and Debian around 800,000. I haven't read the report in a while but at the time Fedora was expanding at 120% every few months, where as the next fastest distro (I think it was gentoo with 60,000) was growing at 40% over the same time, and all the other distros were much lower than that. I would assume that as a result of Fedora's fast growth rate that Fedora's share is closer to Debian's now. Regardless, after those 4 distros, the next largest was Mandrake (iirc) with around 70,000 active servers. As you can see, those 4 distros(Red Hat, Fedora, Novell, & Debian) are all that really matter and if they all agree on the standard, then it is the standard.
    Regards,
    Steve

  10. Re:Whose standard? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    I think this page might be of interest to you.

  11. I'm impressed by beforewisdom · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I'm impressed that Red Hat has signed on.

    Along with 2 other of the more established distros being onboard this standard has a chance.

  12. do they care? by newr00tic · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I mean, do software developers usually keep to this standard, or is it more like them cutting some slack due to numerous distros not adhering to it?

    What if those releasing the libs/support files (QT/GTK2, etc.) _only_ allowed you to use them for free, _IF_ the end product adhered to LSB specs.? --It'd force developers to be less sloppy, and some form of unity might come sooner than expected..

    Yes, an arrogant idea, but just read it as an "what-if" -kind of thing.

    --
    A horse can't be sick, you know, even if he wants to.
  13. 64bit status? by gr8_phk · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I know the debian port for AMD64 decided to make the 64bit arch a first class citizen. i.e. there is a /lib directory. Fedora OTOH uses a /lib64 directory. This is like saying there is something special about 64bit libraries on a 64bit arch. Does the new LSB specify how this should be handled? Who will have to change, debian or Red Hat? I run Fedora and am disappointed to have a /lib64 full of stuff and /lib that is almost empty. Thoughts on this?

    1. Re:64bit status? by MobyDisk · · Score: 2, Interesting

      rpm supports multiple architectures out of the box, and knows how to install them to the proper location. Apt does not. This is actually very frustrating because as a Fedora users, I prefer using apt to yum. But for Debian users, you aren't supposed to even be able to have 64-bit and 32-bit binaries co-existing on one system.

      This article on FC4 had some interesting information.

  14. Re:timing issue by fimbulvetr · · Score: 3, Informative

    Check the story from a couple days ago:

    http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/09/19/ 1128201&tid=156&tid=163&tid=8&tid=106

    Basically, Ulrich Drepper, maintainer of glibc was complaining about how the LSB certification is broken because it's tests are poorly coded and introduce race conditions when ran on fast (read: maybe 700Mhz+ processors) SMP machines.

    Here's a direct link to the article:
    http://www.livejournal.com/users/udrepper/8511.htm l

  15. Ubuntu by saterdaies · · Score: 2, Interesting

    It would be nice if Ubuntu committed to it seeing as though they've become the 10,000 pound gorilla of Linux distributions.

    Note: this isn't anti-Ubuntu. I run Ubuntu.

  16. Mandates RPM by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I don't see how a standard that uses RPM as the mandatory package format will ever gain enough consensus to be successful.

    What kind of a standard is this anyway? For example:

    Applications are also encouraged to uninstall cleanly.

    Um, that's great. Where's the definition of "cleanly"? Where's the rationale? Where's the implementation notes? This thing reads like a few people got together and jotted down a few notes on what they'd like to see. This ain't a specification. Sure, they go into great detail about the format of the RPM file - but that's already an established format that they don't need to explain.

  17. Here's why LSB 3.0 Matters by sjvn · · Score: 4, Interesting

    And, I might mention, I think it matters A Lot.

    http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1861272,00.as p

    From where I sit, Red Hat's Drepper

    http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/09/19/ 1128201

    wants to throw the baby of open standardization out with the bathwater of LSB standardization testing, which could still stand a lot of improvement.

    With open standardization, Linux could go the way of Intel Unix--shudder!

    Steven