[Linux-aus] Uniting Linux - good or bad?

[Jon maddog Hall]

aj at azure.humbug.org.au said:
> The LSB's been coming RSN for ages; it's still a good idea that's only
> getting better, but it hasn't actually succeeded yet. Think of it like a car
> bogged in sand, wheels spinning furiously -- not going anywhere at the
> moment, maybe, but as soon as it gets the right traction, it's outta here.

An interesting observation, and one that ends on the "upbeat".  I prefer to
think of the LSB as not "being bogged down in sand", but a car that joined the
race late, but is accelerating rapidly and catching up with the pack. 

The LSB is a living standard.  It will never be "done".  The goal of the LSB
is to guarantee a minimum platform for applications to run. 

There may always be functionality that will not be included in the LSB.  That
functionality will still be in the design phase, and changing too fast for
a standard like LSB.  These new functionalities will be treated different ways,
typically by shipping new libraries and interfaces with the applications that
use them.  In this case the standard may be how to have the application
identify and link with exactly the library it needs.

It is, of course, undesirable to have libraries that are 99% identical taking
up disk space and real memory, but that may be the price we pay until we
reach consensus on functionality.  In the meantime, a good standards body can
help to resolve those differences.

As new applications need new functionality, and as that functionality gets
codified into libraries and kernel functions, the LSB will change to meet those
new functionalities.  Hopefully they will be added in an upward compatible
format, so old applications will not be bothered by new functionality.

While LSB 2.0 may not meet everyone's needs at the moment, in my mind it does
three basic things:

	o define 90-95% of what the general application needs right now
	o help make the things that are undefined within the scope of a "bug fix"
	  and not a re-design of the application (as it might become without the
	  LSB)
	o start the distributions and applications down the path of coding
	  to a standard, and not coding to a single distribution who happens
	  to be the market leader

LSB does allow for different distributions, different kernels, even different
libraries.  It is just that these differences still have to allow binary
compatability for applications, in my mind a Good Thing(TM).

md
-- 
Jon "maddog" Hall
Executive Director           Linux International(R)
email: maddog at li.org         80 Amherst St. 
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