Basic Question [LWN.net]

Basic Question

Posted Sep 13, 2004 23:53 UTC (Mon) by darthmdh (guest, #8032)
In reply to: Basic Question by ccyoung
Parent article: Linux standard gains big-name backers (News.com)

The previous version of the Redhat Linux Standard Base already enforced the inferior RPM as the package standard (even though it didn't exist on many distributions so was hardly a standard to begin with, hence why I call this the Redhat Linux Standard Base as they had a majority of people on the committee deciding these things). Anyway, I digress.

The good thing about the RLSB though, and what this new version extends, is the userspace ABI. Over at http://www.linuxbase.org/ you can read all about it. We can (and probably will ;) argue about banal things like packaging formats till the cows come home, but even applications for package managment need to be built on top of some base system that's guaranteed to work in a particular fashion.

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Basic Question

Posted Sep 14, 2004 4:22 UTC (Tue) by piman (subscriber, #8957) [Link]

"We" meaning who, you?

Debian has been involved with the LSB since its start, and is fine with the "requirement" to support RPMs; it doesn't say the distribution has to do everything using them, just that they be installable. Which they are on every GNU/Linux-based OS I can think of, and several others (like Solaris). In fact, Red Hat no longer uses the LSB-specified version of RPM natively (they've moved on to RPM 4); they are in the same situation as Debian, Mandrake, Gentoo, Slackware, or any other distribution.

The userspace ABI is convenient, but really the best thing for free software developers (for whom ABI changes are not an intractable problem) is the filesystem-related standards, I think. It definitely simplifies a lot of installation procedures and questions about where the admin knows files will go.

Basic Question

Posted Sep 14, 2004 18:54 UTC (Tue) by AJWM (guest, #15888) [Link]

The LSB never "enforced the inferior RPM as the package standard", it merely required that conforming distros be able to read RPMs. Whether that's done with the rpm command or alien or whatever else, it didn't (and doesn't) say.

As to Red Hat, it always seemed to me that SUSE was more conformant to the spirit of the LSB than Red Hat, although both may have conformed to the letter. (The difference being in things like locations of actual files vs symbolic links to files, etc.)