[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
>
> >Obviously, guaranteeing a compatibility baseline for the whole system
> >isn't practically possible.
>
> Quite; having a "Reference Distro" to develop on would help, though,
> as it allows customers to determine whether an ISV supplied
> package works on the reference distro as promised and whether the
> issue is unique to their distro or not.
>
> While "standards conformance tests" are nice, the experience with
> the Linux Standards Base referenced by Ian in his OGB concall was
> "millions spend and not much to show for it". You can write standards
> tests until you are blue in the face, but it does not allow you
> to give any form of guarantee that applications which pass the tests
> will actually work. That would also require you to verify that the
> application only uses bits covered by the standards tests.
It depends. For some problems it is hard to write a suffucuent test,
for others it is simple but it may still be missing. Remember that I mentioned
the POSIX.1-1988 archive format test I did write in 2002, it was really
straightforward but nobody did it before.
If we have no test, we cannot say anything abut compatibility. Is this what you
prefer?
> That's still a hard problem to solve and I think that that is
> not where I would expect divergence to occur first and foremost.
>
> I would expect libraries to be missing, be in different locations, have
> different versions, different "SONAME"s and that sort of thing; different
> version of GNOME etc.
We need to write down a definition for the compliance and we need to write
tests. It is a nice field where Sun employees may put effort in and if an
independend distro finds out that other distros do not follow the rules,
their makers could create a test that verifies this non-conformance.
Jörg
--
EMail:[EMAIL PROTECTED] (home) Jörg Schilling D-13353 Berlin
[EMAIL PROTECTED] (uni)
[EMAIL PROTECTED] (work) Blog: http://schily.blogspot.com/
URL: http://cdrecord.berlios.de/old/private/ ftp://ftp.berlios.de/pub/schily
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