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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.'"
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Sincerely,
Mr. Comma
Soooo... 3.1. The first usable version of Windows was 3.1 also. Coincidence?!
Maybe this WILL be the year Linux arrives on the desktop!
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
Because it has nothing to do with desktops, per se. It is a specification for directory layouts, config files, and required libraries, and its purpose is to make sure that applications that compile on one system that complies with the LSB will compile on all systems that comply with it.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
No matter what the roadmap from the EDA Consortium says, too freaking many of the tools I use at $WORK refuse to run on anything other than Red Hat 7.2 (I kid you not!)
And, yes, they actually check /etc/redhat-release
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
It's the Linux app ISV's who need to write their apps to this "standard".
So far, that isn't happening.
Nah, it won't be usable until Linux for Workgroups 3.11
Why not "Linux Standard Desktop"?
Because it's existed for far longer then the vast majority of people have even considered using linux for a desktop system (Disclaimer: I have been using linux for my primary desktop for around 6 years)
Meh, shouldn't feed the troll and all that, but LSB set standards for things far beyond the desktop.
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
As we watch competition help the Linux landscape considerably, is LSB a good thing? Gnome and KDE push each other to become better, Java and Mono compete for developers and even Rails and J2EE go after the web market.
Here is a standard that specifes how to package APIs and which APIs to use if you want to have a a LSB complient desktop and application. Isn't that a bit restrictive?
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 :)
>Why not "Linux Standard Desktop"?
...
>Because it's existed for far longer then the vast majority of people have even >considered
LSD, that is.
There's plenty of concern that the LSB platform is restrictive, but I think it's going to be a huge step forward for 'normal' users who don't want to know how to make an application work - we just want to run it. Linux is still an open model and so LSB is not compulsory, and if an application can be built better in an alternative way, great!
I've had plenty of hassle trying to get various packages to work on older Linux systems, spent endless hours trying unsuccessfully to get services for a wireless network running on the previous version of Fedora. I'm hoping LSB will allow a simple download of an executable that just works - the ability to download an exe and just run it seconds later is probably the biggest advantage of Windows v Linux IMHO.
Because it has nothing to do with desktops, per se. It is a specification for directory layouts, config files, and required libraries, and its purpose is to make sure that applications that compile on one system that complies with the LSB will compile on all systems that comply with it.
Um no. Its purpose is that you can create one LSB-compliant application and have it work on all LSB-compliant systems, but it doesn't follow that anything that compiles on an LSB-compliant system is an LSB-compliant application. This might be fairly obvious and what you intended to say, but it's important that people don't think that just because it compiles on their machine it'll work for others.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
There are objectives that you would like to see achieved and there are avenues to achieve those objectives.
So the question becomes, what objectives will the LSB achieve and whether you believe those objectives should be achieved.
The LSB was, originally, an attempt to make it easier for ISV's to port their apps to a "standard" that would run on any Linux box that was LSB "compliant".
One problem was that one "compliant" box did not have the same libraries and such as another "compliant" box.
Another problem was that the various distributions had more financial incentive to push their own partnerships with ISV's rather than wait for the bugs to be worked out of the LSB. Which is why Red Hat and Oracle work so well together.
The third problem is that the LSB does not set a standard. It merely documents what some of the distributions are doing. In effect, they write down what the "de facto" standard was from 6 months ago and publish it 6 months from today.
Eventually (maybe), Linux (the kernel and all apps including desktops) will have matured sufficiently that there will not be such a difference in a year. Until then, the LSB isn't going to be much use.
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.
If you think that sounds painful, wait till he gets out his wizard hat!
Why does my post history abruptly stop? I want to laugh at the stupid things I posted as a kid.
> Um, wasn't Linux supposed to break away from standards and uniformity
:)
No--where on earth did you come up with that silly notion? Linux has achieved most of its success through leveraging existing standards (e.g. POSIX, TCP/IP, ISO language standards). The one that tries to "break away" from standards is MS, because standards don't promote customer lock-in. If you follow standards, then customers may be able to look at other vendors that follow the same standards.
Standards in Linux are not mandated (because you have the freedom to do whatever you want with the code, pretty much), but are greatly respected and generally followed when possible/reasonable. Standard-breaking Linux projects (and I admit there are some) are almost always completely outside of the mainstream.
> or is that just breaking away from Microsoft standards?
"Microsoft standards?" Isn't that an oxymoron?
What MS mostly has is ad-hoc, undocumented arbitrary code which the rest of the world is just supposed to accept as-is without questioning. The main notice they take of standards is when the see an opportunity to embrace-and-extend to subvert a standard (see ISO C, HTML, Java, Kerberos, etc., etc.)
> Sarcasm if you didn't get it.
Um...does that mean that you're a troll, rather than just a very clueless person? If so, then count me as trolled, but my post is really addressed to those who are clueless enough to think there's some validity at all to what you posted.
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...
“Our opponent is an alien starship packed with nuclear bombs. We have a protractor.” — Neal Stepnenso
As long as the standard requires rpm files, its going to be a non-starter for many. The rpm format sucks the big one. I would much rather almost anything else than be stuck in RPM HELL. Give me slackpacks, apt-get, or even tarballs...but please save us from RPM Hell!
ttyl
Farrell
p.s. I don't like rpm, can you guess?
CAN-CON 2019 - Ottawa's only book oriented Science Fiction Convention! October 18-20, Sheraton Hotel, Ottawa, Canada h
I sure hope Caldera is one of the others!
(SCOre: 5 Ironic)