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LSB Not Enough

LSB Not Enough

Posted Sep 14, 2004 0:31 UTC (Tue) by koide (guest, #22687)
In reply to: LSB Not Enough by hppnq
Parent article: Bruce Perens: the Linux colonel talks (vnunet)

Because each Linux flavor is comparable to a single proprietary Unix (AFAIK there're no different flavors of solaris, hp/ux, etc.). So supporting Linux is supporting each different distro, and there're certainly more than 20.

Thinking on widely used ones you might get to 5 or 6 instead of 20, but the problem is still far from trivial for not trivial systems, especially when you're focused on users which won't be happy compiling each part of the system.

A good approach for this issue might be to install in a specific, non standard location while LSB is LNSB, such as Sun's jre (/usr/java), though this doesn't solve library naming issues, so you end up with duplicate libraries (see OpenEV or FGS).

You might ask, why not use RPM/apt/whatever? Because then the maintenance cost is huge (updating each part of the system, and tracking each distro specific change, which happens in between versions of the same distro). You can use your package format of choice once you've built the tree in an independant way, of course, but that's against the spirit of packages, I'd say.


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