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How the LSB Keeps Linux One Big Happy Family
blackbearnh writes "The Linux Standard Base is the grand attempt to create a binary-level interface that application developers can use to create software which will run on any distribution of Linux. Theodore Tso, who helps maintain the LSB, talked recently with O'Reilly News about what the LSB does behind the scenes, how it benefits ISVs and end users, and what the greatest challenges left on the plate are. 'One of the most vexing problems has been on the desktop where the Open Source community has been developing new desktop libraries faster than we can standardize them. And also ISVs want to use those latest desktop libraries even though they may not be stable yet and in some ways that's sort of us being a victim of our own success. The LSB desktop has been getting better and better and despite all the jokes that for every year since I don't know probably five years ago, every year has been promoted as the year of the Linux desktop. The fact of the matter is the Linux desktop has been making gains very, very quickly but sometimes as a result of that some of the bleeding edge interfaces for the Linux desktop haven't been as stable as say the C library. And so it's been challenging for ISVs because they want to actually ship products that will work across a wide range of Linux distributions and this is one of the places where the Linux upstream sources haven't stabilized themselves.'"
Linux On The Desktop? When did that happen? I am still trying to get linux to work as a M$ replacement and it still isn't even close to as easy to setup and use. Just try installing Flash to work in the browser. On the desktop means user friendly, which it still is not.
Athiesm is a religion like not collecting stamps is a hobby.
LSB is nothing more than the top level Band-Aid on the giant stack of Band-Aids that make up Linux.
LSB, package managers, and rest of everything Linux. Why make the hard grown up choices that Commercial Software companies do every day when you can just come up with another Band-Aid and slap in on top of the giant stack of previous Band-Aids that make up the mess of an OS.
"I note that Debian Etch is listed as planning to become LSB"
Well, AFAIK is mostly compliant if not completly compliant but for the paper. But this compliancy is basically of the kind of POSIX compliance on Windows NT: good to put it on a brochure and almost nothing else. Installing a LSB-compliant package on Linux means basically forget about the whole distribution (since it'll be a RPM package that won't integrate on the standard package database) or lose both compliancy and working ability since alienize a RPM will almost surely fail in subtle manners. It's as simply as that if I, as a user and sysadmin, wanted to install RPMs, I'd be using a RPM-base Linux distribution.
And then, the only packages I've seen that LSB compliancy made sense were privative-licensed and binary-only distributed, so no amount of LSB-compliancy would make me happy to use them.
"The idea is that it will no longer matter what distro you use"
Almost true but then, if it makes no difference why should I use any other? That's why Red Hat is the strongest pusher of the LSB among distributions: they hope that if they can convince enough people that indeed it makes no difference their dominant position and the network effect will sweep out rivals eventually. Then it won't be that it doesn't matter what distribution you use but that there will be just one distribution to choose from.