Please read what you wrote...

Posted Jan 5, 2009 21:41 UTC (Mon) by khim (subscriber, #9252)
In reply to: Then why bother? by drag
Parent article: Android netbook is a possibility (Inquirer)

LSB can't provide

If LSB can't provide then LSB must die. It's as simple as that. LSB has no value, it gives you nothing - except the raight to put yet another useless stamp on your distribution.

It's not used by ISV (how many LSB packages can you name?), it's huge time sink for a lot of people - why does it exist? To pay salary for "professionals" who create this stillborn standard?

They can go around and wave their hands and try to make a 100% solution, but it's completely bullshit if nobody follows it, which nobody will.

If you are big enough then there are possibility that people will follow 100% solution. Time will tell if Google and OHA are big enough. Nobody follows LSB so why are you still beating this dead horse?

As for 'Why bother?'.. there is a certain subset of Linux OS that people can agree on, more or less. So... LSB defines that for ISVs. It at least gives people something to work with.

Name one who bought this bull-shit and is still around to tell the tales. There are some LSB packages - but they are made from native Linux packages by companies who want one more stamp, not by companies who foolishly tried to use LSB as platform.

Hell I don't even have compatibility _right_now_. How the hell is anything suppose to be compatibility with software from 10 years ago with Linux software wasn't compatibility with anything from back then in the first place?

Easy: you make the platform, declare it "version 1.0" (or 2.0 or 10.0) and say "we will support binary compatibility for this version... ~~forever~~ for 10 years". It was done before. GNOME, KDE, etc - they all support backward compatibility... but it does not really work. Why? Easy: system includes some compatible components (GTK+ or QT) and incompatible components (GStreamer, libstdc++, etc). Programs use both stable components and unstable ones - and the end result is unstable system. The only way to overcome this is to limit amount of stuff in your distribution. Zero unstable components. You can not fix this or that problem without breaking binary compatibility? No problem - fix it! We'll gladly include your version in next release - expect it to be out 2018 or 2019. What? You can not wait so long? Ok - then implement some workaround.

Normal distributors can not work this way: if Ubuntu will try to limit choices - free software developers will just declare jihad and refuse to support such a distribution. And since there are no ISVs to fill the void... the whole platform will just disapper. OHA does have weight to say to developers "my way or the highway" - or so it looks today. If it'll happen - we'll have linux (albeit not GNU/Linux, sadly) for consumer desktop. If not... well may be someone else will do it...

P.S. The really sad thing is that induvidual projects work this way already. They just can not agree to do "big switches" synchronously - and so we have major breakage twice per year instead of once per decade...