Paul E Condon wrote: > I've been talking to other Linux users in my area (Colorado, USA) > about their problems with Red Hat dropping their user, non-enterprise, > distribution. I suggest Debian. I say its really great. But I'm told > "But it doesn't comply with 'Linux Standard Base' ".
True today. But LSB compliance is a *major* item for the 'sarge' release. The Debian LSB team is working very hard to get that done. Things are on track. It is everyone's hope that sarge will be fully LSB compliant. Note that I have only been snooping on the lists in this area and am not speaking in any official capacity. As a lurker it seems to me that most of the current LSB issues seem to be surrounding how particular commands are enabled for native language support. In the grand scheme of things internationalization (aka i18n) is new and not all of the software programs handle it right. Some of the distros that have been certified have patched the programs with patches that the upstream authors have rejected as unmaintainable. Code is duplicated and similar bad practices. It would be bad for Debian to hack the code similarly. It is better to slog through it and really fix the problem at the source level. But that takes time and resources and sometimes only from key people in the upstream. In the earlier days of the LSB the problems were ensuring the existance of standard programs and standard interfaces to those programs. The system comes with /bin/sh. Does it comply with the standards? How about kill and sleep? Most of those problems have been worked out. But a few still remain. > So what is Linux Standard Base? And who does comply with it? And is > this important to Debian? No flames please. If it is something that > was started by Red Hat, it should hardly matter to those left behind > in a business model shift. The LSB is extremely important to free software distributions such as GNU/Linux and to Debian. In many ways it levels the playing field between the distributions. If a system is LSB compliant then LSB compliant packages can be installed on the system with the confidence that everything will work fine. This removes the stigma of not running on a "vendor qualified version". Right now Debian is often the odd person out. Becoming a Debian user you suddenly know first hand how Mac users have been feeling for years in a MS-Windows world. You can't get software from the same place as other people. No one else understands you. Everyone looks at you funny. But everything just works. A common problem for people trying to use Debian in a corporate environment is that 3rd party software will often require a specific version of a specific distribution (e.g. RH 7.3 or RHAW 2.1) to be installed upon or to have support. This is a terrible problem! If I look across the vendors there is no overlap. There is no single system version, let alone distro, which all of the vendors would support. One says RH 8.0 only, another says RH 7.2 only, etc. This is a completely unreasonable situation. Add to that the fact that we are actually using Debian instead and we are not getting any support from any of our vendors. Fortunately we have not needed any support because all of our 3rd party applications (mostly CAD/EDA apps for VLSI design) are running fine on Debian regardless. It is, after all, simply GNU/Linux just like the other systems. This is the essense of the Linux Standards Base. It is a Good Thing. Bob P.S. Although it may sound like it the LSB is not just for businesses. It is a Good Thing for individual users as well.
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