Perhaps one direction would be to have ISV's use a "LSB distro" against which they can test
their packages. If it works on the LSB edition, it should work against any other GNU/Linux
distribution also certified to meet the LSB.
However, I doubt that the distributors will agree easily about the minimal content for such a
distribution. These days, such an idea may even be moot if the QA process can test against VM
images of Debian Stable, Ubuntu LTS, SUSE and Red Hat Enterprise (it's not like there's
licensing costs...).
K3n.