On 06/01/2011 07:25 AM, Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton wrote:
so in _that_ regard, the question becomes: "are the efforts of the free software community better off being spent elsewhere"? and "what benefit is there *TO THE FREE SOFTWARE COMMUNITY* of doing LSB for ARM"? forget the proprietary junkies, they'll suck anything from us that moves and not give a dime in return.
That seems to be my cue to provide the community case for the LSB. The LSB provides several things to the community:- a framework for allowing Linux distributions to pool their userbase and work together as one platform instead of multiple platforms, one per distro
- test suites which identifies both compatibility problems and outright bugs to be detected and fixed
- a method for targeting builds at multiple distributions at once, both proprietary and free
- reporting tools for finding portability problems in built apps, again for both proprietary and free apps
We currently provide all of this for 7 architectures. ARM benefits indirectly (for example, many of the compatibility breaks detected on, say, x86_64 will affect all archs equally), but indirect support doesn't include the tools we've developed, and often compatibility issues are arch-specific.