Latest Linux Standards Base Gets Vendor Support

Neopallium writes to tell us that in a recent announcement at the Desktop Linux Summit the Free Standards Group reports fourteen of the leading Linux vendors have pledged support for the newest release of the Linux Standards Base. From the article: "'The Release of LSB 3.1 is another milestone achieved by the industry and the Open Source Community that delivers ever increasing value to customers,' said Reza Rooholamini, director of enterprise solutions engineering at Dell. 'It enables further uniformity and standardization across applications and distributions that allows quicker deployment of Linux solutions with higher levels of quality.'"

Comments

Important time saver

[Zaai]

This is excellent news. Linux application developers write their applications against a particular distribution. Some add code to detect what distro the installation is for and adjust their paths accordingly. All other distro's have to spend time to write an installer to map that configuration to their distribution's file system layout. This is repeated every time a new release of a package comes out. With 100,000+ packages, that is a lot of work. Take Gentoo's ebuild system. Can you image how much effort it takes to maintain all those ebuilds? Any standardization of the Linux filesystem layout will reduce this effort and saves countless hours. Hours now can be used to improve applications themselves. Good news indeed :)

LSB is a Pipe Dream Really

[segedunum]

The only way to reliably guarantee binary compatibility (especially with the test suites the LSB use) and compatibility to any important degree is to have the same binaries, and henceforth, the same distribution. It is actually possible to pass the certification for the LSB with one set of hardware and fail it with another.

LSB compatibility is a nice badge to put on your software boxes (management love accreditation logos!), but whether it will mean anything to the ISVs who should be taking notice of it and anything practical for end users is another question.

Has LSB fixed RPM hell yet?

[sinewalker]

I hope 3.1 addresses my main gripe with RPMs: an RPM built for Fedora won't install into SUSE because of dependency issues, or vice versa.

I'm still reading the latest spec to see if this has been or is going to be addressed. When/if it is, then I'll be very happy, because it will mean finally the end to confusion about using the "right" RPM repositories for your distro: if the distro is LSB compliant, then any RPM repository for that distro should work with other LSB compliant distros, with the dependencies for packages containing Base libraries being met or at least consistant accross the distros.

Until that happy day, the LSB doesn't add a lot of value to me as an end-user. As a developer, it does have some small value, in that it provides me a consistent API, but that's about it...