> > This is a dying mechanism of software distribution. You can achieve the > > same goal by shipping a container or some container-like thing that > > includes all the shared libraries you care about. > > I am puzzled. I run a Linux distro mirror, and most of the distos > have vast binary repositories or appstores, some have source repositories. > I don't see them going away. They are vital for the distro infrastructure, > > Android and Apple have even vaster binary appstores, which were key to their > successes. > Microsoft failed to have a well-equipped appstore, and I think this was key > to MS > failing and folding in the smartphone market. > > So this is key technology for Linux/unix systems, or am I wrong? > I understand that this was not the percieved purpose of LSB, which was > intended for ISV's
I think the fundamental distinction is that a Linux distribution such as in your mirror is *self consistent*. All the bits of Fedora 30 work together and match. It's not necessarily consistent with a five year old CentOS but it is mostly consistent ABI-wise with say a modern Debian or recent Ubuntu because ABI tends to be driven by the application/toolkit owners and they've learned about consistency being good - plus the tooling for it is now way better. In other words grab a random Fedora 30 binary and try and run it on CentOS 7 and it may well fail. A binary that works on Fedora 30 probably works on Ubuntu 18, modern Debian and RHEL8. Quite probably on many older things too but its not defined to do so. I don't think an ABI document can actually fix that any more. The nature of software development has changed. When LSB was founded software came in releases - say 1.0 one year, 1.1 9 months later to fix what 1.0 should have been, 2.0 two years after that. Releases involved lumps of plastic, shipping, manuals, advertising collateral, press interviews, trade show timing, product placement etc Today a point release for open source involves some testing, two git commands, and distribution is pretty much friction free. The cost of a 'release' has dropped to nearly zero, but the cost of compliance testing to some pile of paper is a constant. For proprietary software it's not that much more (except in the USA where you can spend months on export compliance ;-) ) The ABI issue is being fixed with decentralized API ownership, rapid updating and automated build/test and test suites. Part of that rapid flow is also the decision that it's lower cost to fix breakages across boundaries than nail them down and six year old forks of code are generally toxic waste. Alan _______________________________________________ lsb-discuss mailing list [email protected] https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/lsb-discuss
