Bruce Dubbs <[email protected]> writes: > However, I think the focus is too narrow. There still needs to be some > sort of definition of what it means to be a Linux OS.
Why? This is a sincere question: I'm curious what problem you have that you believe would be solved by this definition. The one that comes to mind personally is API (not ABI) compatibility: can I compile this piece of software on the system. But in practice this is achieved by every distribution using the same basic seet of libraries, or is solved by API compatibility at the alternative library implementation level, rather than at the Linux definitional level. I'm reminded of all the effort that went into defining a POSIX shell (and I include myself in this; I've spent many hours on the topic and memorized all sorts of arcane rules required to write portable shell scripts). Yet in my experience, outside the rarified world of people who write extremely portable code for a hobby or are trying to make dash work as /bin/sh in a distribution, everyone just uses #!/bin/bash and the bash man page and ignores POSIX. Observation is not endorsement. I like standards, and personally would feel more comfortable if all this behavior were written down in formal documentation, and there were multiple competing implementations following the same specification. But my unease with the chaos of programming to implementations isn't a very strong argument for the amount of ongoing engineering effort required to maintain a standard. -- Russ Allbery ([email protected]) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/> _______________________________________________ lsb-discuss mailing list [email protected] https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/lsb-discuss
