On Wed, Feb 20, 2002 at 09:27:14AM -0500, Stuart Anderson wrote:
> We put it in there for a reason, and so far, I don't think anyone has
> correctly recalled the reason. Unfortunately, it was done so long ago that
> I don't remember all of the details either.
You know, if no one can think of the reason in the months since this
was first brought up in response to the "1.0" spec release, it quite
simply can't have been a remotely good one. It's already evident that
absolutely *none* of the stake holders in the LSB have any particular
interest in keeping it, and a number of important stakeholders (Debian,
you know, the second or third most popular Linux distribution worldwide,
and everyone who wants their LSB compliant packages to run on Debian; not
to mention Solaris ("Sun's implementation of Linux", if you'll recall))
have a strong desire to have it removed.
> I think part of the reason for having added this was that this was an area
> where divergence was beginning to occur, and those participating at the time
> felt that we should specify the common practice to prevent further divergence.
Preventing divergence is not the LSB's charter. The LSB's charter is
to specify a set of APIs that will allow useful third party software
to run across a wide variety of systems. Specifying the uid of the bin
user does not make it easier to write software for Linux systems, and
it limits the number of systems on which LSB-compliant software can run.
> Unfortunately, we can't just remove it. It has been published as part
> of the standard. What we can do, however, is to mark that portion as
> "deprecated" and remove it in a future release.
The standard is recognised to be buggy and there is no existing userbase.
What better time do you think there'll be to remove it?
Of course, I suppose you could argue that if the standard is kept buggy,
there probably won't ever be a userbase. Do you really want to?
Enough with going around in circles about pointless nonsense. There are
a handful of simple changes that are needed right now for the LSB to
achieve its goals. It's time to make them.
Who has commit access to version 1.2 of the spec?
Cheers,
aj
--
Anthony Towns <aj@humbug.org.au> <http://azure.humbug.org.au/~aj/>
We came. We Saw. We Conferenced. http://linux.conf.au/
``Debian: giving you the power to shoot yourself in each
toe individually.'' -- with kudos to Greg Lehey
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