On 03/28/2014 04:21 PM, R P Herrold wrote:
On Fri, 28 Mar 2014, "Jóhann B. Guðmundsson" wrote:
( what is weights and measures other then standards ) but that undesputable
fact aside I dont see how the failure of LSB as an standard which boils down
to it being drive/dominated by Red Hat and Novell/Suse and the lack of it
being capable of keeping up with changes in the GNU/Linux ecosystem, can be
applied to the work that is being done here or it being mapped one to one with
that work.
Wearing my centos co-founder hat, I assure that there is no
'domination' there, and I've been present for more than a
decade. There formerly was some, when an addition of Java was
being pushed by some enterprise stakeholders [Sun was still
free-standing at that time], but that is ancient history by
now
Last time I check and from dawn of time the LSB standard required
application to be packaged in RPM format which immediately excludes
distributions that do not use RPM as their default/preferred package manager
These days, there is just: participation. As to 'keeping up',
the Fedora mantra of 'move fast, be willing to experiment and
break stuff' is scarcely something a standards track should
aspire to
Fast moving distributions as well as standalone applications and
application stacks should be able to follow well defined standards.
If not that just highlights shortcomings of that standard not the
distribution or the application or application stack.
LSB starves from insufficient quantities of software
engineering talent. Its processes are in all material
respects open, and based on free and open sources. Anyone
with the inclination can play along. A request for help gets
a thoughtful answer and pointer in under 24 hr (mailing list),
in under 8 hr (IRC), and in under a week (bug tracker triage).
Wiki rights are accessible with a mere registration to stop
spamming. We run an open weekly conferencall and minutes
result and cross our mailing list
We lost one FTE about a year ago, and there is just not enough
horsepower. We ran a all day (I had to leave after six hours)
planning event at the LF Collab summit, with G+ and dial
inaccess, all duly noticed on our mailing list, and a grand
total of 6 people participated
How do individuals join the standards committee?
Canonical seems to look solely to Posix these days. Fedora
glances in our direction but does not seek LSB conformance
certification, nor materially participate in our effort to get
LSB 5 'out the door'. Debian is so glacial and enjoys
flyspecking and squabbling (witness the recent 'systemd'
dustup and vote, that they don't participate much. The SUSE
enterprise product tests and participates; RHEL 7 will add a
new approach to conformance if the beta is any sign, and has
had a representative filing bugs with us. Oracle treats the
OS as a foundation for its DB engine products, and does not
really need an LSB imprimatur to sell its product
But it is like the child's story of _The Little Red Hen_ ...
all will eat the bread, but few really are willing to
participate in its preparation. I can think of three people
continuously present, triaging, and working bugs. That's it
This highlights the fact that the joining process might be to
complicated or lack of buy in from distribution and application
developers due to the standards not being maintained/defined well enough.
Why should an application or distribution strive to follow and meet
those standards when they are not in the buisness of selling or
supporting that distribution, application or application stack since to
me that standard has always seemed to be more written to favoring those
that make profit out of GNU/Linux ( Red Hat/Novel etc) and related
software rather than being focused on standardization/unification in the
GNU/Linux ecosystem.
Probably we (LSB.next, so to speak) made a mistaken design
choice to widen coverage at LSB 5 made two years ago, to chase
later libraries (gtk / qt), rather than narrowing scope to
core utility. But that was what the ISVs and the certifying
entities said was needed then. I hacked back that wiki's list
of deliverables, pretty ruthlessly over the past 9 months as
we have worked on the release (feature based, rather than time
boxed)
I cannot think of a single third party open bug on 5 filed
after the first beta drop, and it is ready to go once we
complete the rest of our P1 items
Few bugs open does not mean that standard is well written it might just
as well mean nobody is following/using thus have faith in it and the
fragmentation in the GNU/Linux ecosystem itself is evidence enough that
LSB is failing as standardization body since it does not solve the
problems it initially was created to solve.
JBG
_______________________________________________
advisory-board mailing list
advisory-board@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/advisory-board
