Yes, there are a lot of misunderstanding there and it looks that Debian
guys have only superficial knowledge about how LSB is supposed to work.
In particular, no mention of the huge test suite that can be useful even
if you are not going to certify for compliance but just want to increase
quality of your distribution. I don't believe that huge number of
maintainers eliminates the need in automated tests. E.g., "As it stands
today, he said, Debian's lsb-* meta-packages attempt to require the
correct versions of the libraries mentioned in the standard, but no one
is actually checking that all of the symbols and data definitions are
met as a result." - well, why not to launch libchk...
I really think that the value of LSB and accompanying artifacts is
highly understated. Many people treat the compliance as a formal
procedure and don't see the real value they can achieve. As it was
discussed quite long ago, a possible future direction for LSB is not to
work hard on a document (large book) that lists a ton of interfaces, but
promote different tools that would help developers to improve
compatibility, quality, etc.
On 10/14/2015 04:27 PM, Mats Wichmann wrote:
Some/many of you may have seen an LWN article which has been moderately
widely quoted elsewhere describing Debian's move away from a full LSB
support package. What I wanted to note here was one of the comments on
the article:
"VirtualBox provides a package which aims to run on random Linux
distributions. We do not pay attention to the LSB, instead we try to
work with what distributions actually do. More specifically, we are
moving to looking at the tools present on a system (e.g. systemd,
insserv for system services) rather than the actual distribution and
working with those, fixing things when that breaks in some particular
configuration which we think is worth supporting."
What this commenter holds out as better is actually almost exactly the
problem LSB was trying to solve: application developers have to work out
what each distro is doing, use that, and then fix those special
approaches on each system, whereby it becomes clear only a few
especially high value distributions end up supported since everybody
changes a little all the time and it won't be worth keeping up with
those changes.
Depressing that the message seems to have been so completely misunderstood.
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Regards,
Denis.
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