Linux Foundation Promises LSB4

gbjbaanb writes "Ever thought it was difficult to write software for Linux? For multiple distros? InternetNews reports that the LSB is making a push for their next release (due out later this year) that should help make all that much easier. Although the LSB has not lived up to expectations, this time around Linux has a higher profile and ISVs are more interested. This is to help persuade them to develop applications that will run on any LSB-compliant Linux distribution. If it gets adopted, LSB 4 could bring a new wave of multidistribution Linux application development. 'It is critically important for Linux to have an easy way for software developers to write to distro "N," whether it's Red Hat, Ubuntu or Novell,' [said Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation.] 'The reason you need that is because we don't want what happened to Unix to happen to Linux in terms of fragmentation.' The LSB defines a core set of APIs and libraries, so ISVs can develop and port applications that will work on LSB-certified Linux distributions."

Comments

Re:Distribution

[dlgeek]

You should wonder about will it run.

Debian and Ubuntu use exactly the same packaging format (.deb). Try taking a debian package from a few years back and installing it on your system. Chances are, it won't work due to library incompatibilities.

Now you could probably rebuild it for your system, but depending on what it is, it may or may not work.

When you say "how hard it is going to bed to compile and update"...that's exactly what LSB is working on. It'll be trivially easy to compile a program written against the LSB specs on any LSB compatible distro.

Re:POSIX...?

[larry bagina]

POSIX has multiple components -- kernel APIs, command line utilities, shell scripting, libraries, etc -- so there's more too it than just the linux kernel.