getting started

[Havoc Pennington]

On Tue, 2004-10-26 at 09:31 +0100, Mike Hearn wrote:
> George Kraft wrote:
> > The three key ingredients for a successful standardization and
> > certification are:
> 
> Does it make sense to be certified? Wouldn't this just slow us down? 
> What's the benefit to the typical desktop Linux developer today (ie open 
> source guy or small commercial enterprise). Windows isn't a certified 
> standard,  does that hold it back?
> 
> They aren't rhetorical questions, I really don't know the answer. I'm 
> not sure what certification gets us apart from making very large, 
> conservative companies happier.
> 

The key point of the LSB defining an ABI is to let ISVs know which of
the zillion things in /usr/lib on a typical Linux system are safe to
use. Safe means well-maintained, supported, likely to still be working
in 5 years, etc.

Much of /usr/lib is most definitely *not* safe in this sense. ;-)
I'll avoid naming specific libs since the lib maintainer usually gets
offended.

The LSB then goes a step further and has automatic verification tools
for the ISV app, and for the distribution, to be sure the ISV isn't
cheating and using unsupported interfaces, and the distribution is
properly exporting the supported ones. This is very useful to developers
since we don't get locked in to supporting immature APIs for eternity,
and useful for ISVs since they don't accidentally use those APIs.

> > 	1) detailed written specification
> 
> Hmm, does the documentation count here? Bear in mind GTK+ is not fully 
> documented (yet).

Other than deprecated APIs, I would guess it has a reference entry on
each function or pretty close. The main gap is tutorial stuff.

> > 	2) a widely adopted implementation
> 
> Well, we'd be standardising de-facto standard implementations. I'm not 
> convinced it's possibly or sensible to specify the behaviour of a widget 
> toolkit exactly enough that you can do a clean-room reimplementation 
> from it and have it just drop in. That's a huge amount of effort, maybe 
> not even possible at all.

It isn't possible, no. In the case of the toolkits it shouldn't be
necessary though, since all the various UNIX and Linux vendors can just
ship the standard implementation.

> > 	3) conformance test suites
> 
> How do you test a widget toolkit? GTK has thousands of entry points, and 
> AFAIK there isn't any formal test suite currently apart from gtk-demo 
> and a few test programs in the tree.

There is a GTK+ test suite that Sun wrote. It's in gnome CVS as "gtkvts"

Not comprehensive, but it checks that the entry points exist and so
forth.

Havoc