On Thu, 2004-12-09 at 15:10 -0500, Daniel Jacobowitz wrote: > As one of the maintainers involved in Debian's toolchain, I think this > is a terrible idea. Our needs are different than other distributions, > we already know that from experience. The core needs are conceptually > the same - everyone needs working libraries and tools - but the details > we consider worth fixing are not.
Can you provide examples? I'm not trying to be dense--I'm simply trying to understand what, if anything, is so irreconcilable, as some of you seem to be suggesting is the case here. > So during the sarge release > cycle, when we need to make updates to fix an RC bug in glibc that > doesn't affect any platform shipped by any other member of the LCC, > which has moved on to new development according to some other member's > release schedule, what would we do? We'd have to rebuild them anyway. > There goes our "common binaries" advantage. > > >From the web site, I see that LCC has a limited set of architectures > targeted anyway. Debian will continue to use common source for all > architectures. That will make working with the LCC difficult. First, because the four founding members are commercial entities, we're mainly interested in the architectures that are predominant in commercial environments. That's all about aligning resources with relative priorities and certainly isn't a statement that we will never support anything else. If resources and priorities change, the set of supported architectures could change as well. Second, the common core will have a release schedule corresponding to the release schedule of the LSB standard (roughly every 12-18 months), and the members' release schedules will be synchronized to match that. > Using binaries from LCC would also run against the Debian principle of > always building Debian packages from their source before uploading > them. That's a big deal. I'm not sure I follow--we all have to build packages from source, and the LCC will be no different, so where's the problem exactly? > I'm sure other members of the LCC have similar concerns - or will. > What are they doing about them? Well, for one, we're trying to open a dialog with the Debian community. :-) > Are the other companies listed as "supporting" the Linux Core > Consortium interested in this "common binaries" plan? Their support > quotes only explicitly support the Linux Standard Base. Yes. (And you'd better re-read the quotes--all but one, IIRC, explicitly mentions the LCC too.) > We would never have a common kernel with these vendors anyway - they > don't even have a common kernel with each other. My experience tells > me that would be a big barrier to certification of any kind. The LCC core will include a common kernel. > If there is merit to the common binaries, I think we would get more > mileage from it by supporting them as we do the LSB: with separate > packages on top of the Debian base system. That's certainly an option I've thought a lot about--the main question is, is this good enough to get the ISV support? It probably isn't to get the tier 1 ISVs (Oracle etc.), but it might be to get some of the smaller ISVs, and that's better than nothing at all. -- Ian Murdock 317-578-8882 (office) http://www.progeny.com/ http://ianmurdock.com/ "All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dreams with open eyes, to make it possible." -T.E. Lawrence
