gnome-hello

[Owen Taylor]

On Mon, 2004-08-09 at 05:25, Mike Hearn wrote:

> The other concern I have about the LSB is that currently it seems most 
> distros don't actually install the LSB conformance packages. They are 
> very small and only add things like /etc/lsb-release, a symlink for the 
> linker and so on, but still distros like Fedora and SuSE don't seem to 
> include it in the base package sets. The LSB has been out for a long 
> time now, so this does worry me. How do you know if what you're 
> installing into is LSB compliant if the necessary files and symlinks 
> aren't in place?

Well, if packaging as an RPM, you simply

 Requires: lsb >= 2.0

Or whatever is  appropriate. If people start actively taking advantage
of the LSB, I'm sure it will get moved into the base package set.

> Last concern about the LSB I have is that I think it unlikely open 
> source desktop apps will ever actually be LSB conformant because they 
> will want to use libraries outside of whatever platform is specified and 
> the LSB specifically prohibits this. You might get a lot of informal 
> "mostly" compliant apps though.

I see this as very much a one-way-or-the-other 

 - If you want an app that is binary compatible across distributions
   then you should restrict yourself to the LSB.

 - If you don't care about cross-distribution binary compatibility then
   you can use whatever you like on the platform you want to run on.

Open-source apps typically don't need to be binary compatible across
distributions because there are always people out there eager to 
rebuild for their favorite distribution.

I honestly don't know what the interest is in cross-distro binary
compatibility in general. But I do know that if you *do* want to
see cross-distro binary compatibility, then you should be working
to extend the LSB to cover the libraries you need.

Regards,
						Owen

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