Re: real LSB compliance
On Tue, Jul 03, 2001 at 11:34:51PM -0500, Manoj Srivastava wrote:
>
> You shall certainly get some volunteers, but only if things
> are still fixable (anything written in stone does not sound very
> enticing).
Stuff isn't written in stone, but making changes is (truth to tell)
much harder than it was four weeks ago, since the whole point in
having a standard is maintaining compatibility. So the bar for
justifying changes has been rasied, but if there are sound technical
reasons (as opposed to individual Debian users throwing temper
tantrums), changes *can* be made.
One thing which is somewhat personally frustrating in terms of LSB and
working with Debian is that it's hard to find anyone who can actually
speak for Debian in any kind of binding way. So suppose we get some
volunteers, and they help out with the LSB, and we come up with a
released LSB 1.1 --- is that going to be any different from the
situation we have now?
No doubt someone else will find things that they don't like about the
standard (keep in mind there's stuff here that Red Hat and the other
distributions aren't completely happy with either --- that's one of
the things that comes with "compromise" and "consensus"), and at that
point, they will drag out the old, tired line about how an individual
Debian developer can't bind the entire project, and just because they
didn't complain about some section of the LSB while it was being
discussed doesn't mean that the Debian as a whole accepts it.
After all, (not to put Wichert on the spot), for a large part of the
time while the LSB was under development, the Debian Project Leader at
the time was involved. So if he participates in mailing lists where
various decisions are made, what precisely does that mean?
Apparently, nothing. For other distributions, though, it's possible
for the folks who are involved in the give and take of standards
setting to essentially make agreements which stick. Given the
governance model of Debian, however, it's much harder for any
organization to work with Debian if the issues involved span more than
a single, individual package, and (in the case of LSB) potentially
affect the entire distribution.
So if the LSB is changed in a number of ways, and then once LSB 1.1 is
shipped, more people kvetch and complain about it, what happens next?
- Ted
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