What's a developer to do?

[Jon maddog Hall]

sconce at in-spec-inc.com said:
> If that's correct, a developer who tries to package binaries for every
> distribution has chosen a difficult task.  A few organizations  (such as
> Mozilla) can do it, but it's a big deal. 

> If a developer asks that all distributions synchronize libraries isn't she
> wagging the dog, getting it kind of backwards? 

This is what LSB is supposed to make better/easier.  LSB specifies that for
a given level of LSB, the distribution has to use a certain level of libraries.

If a distribution is "LSB compliant", then it uses that level of libraries,
and you therefore know that "Red Hat VX.x" and "SuSE VY.y" both of which
are LSB VZ.z compliant should be able to run the binaries from TCL VW.w

The FSG studies these things enough to note where binary inconsistencies will
be and to warn groups that they are coming.

TCL should be building to the LSB, not to a specific distribution.  If more
layered applications and languages did this, it would send a very loud and
clear message to the distribution vendors to pull into line behind and support
the LSB effort.

One of the problems is that this is complex, and the whole thing is still under
development and transition.  Not all distributions build and test against the
LSB, and this creates issues for people like the TCL developers that want to
support all distributions, not just LSB compliant distributions.

Of course we could just solve this problem by people abandoning the use of
any distribution other than Red Hat.  Then we just rename the company to
"Microsoft".

md
-- 
Jon "maddog" Hall
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