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Re: Standards and debians compatibility



On Thu, 2002-10-03 at 20:41, Jonas Meurer wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> I know that there are many standards for linux and other software, and
> debian is compatible to some of them. But is there a statisic with many
> important standards, and to which of them debian is compatible?
> Also, is debian really compatible, or just a little bit?

I guess this is one of those questions where the only possible answer is
'it depends'.

I'm not a standards expert, but these standards are frequently
mentioned:

FS-STD (has changed the name?), LSB: I think Debian tries to follow
these, and iirc some DD are present in the relevant groups. Acutal
compliance of any given Debian installation will depend on the packages
installed.

the IETF standards: topics vary widely, and compliance is as widely
varying. Also highly dependant on a per package basis.

ISO/ANSI C, C++, pascal, SQL and other standardized languages: Debian
usually has no significant changes from the upstream sources, so you'd
have to look there.

posix, and other unix standards: this is implemented by 
 - the installed tools - again: upstream is often unchanged
 - the libc (Debian *BSD is not using glibc at the moment? I think I
heard something like this, so compliance might vary with the platform)
 - the compiler - see above.

Also, some Unix flavours are contradictory to others, so any given
system might not be able to follow all existing standards (the man pages
of the Linux kernel system calls often have a section 'conforming
to...'.)

Also, Debian is changing quite fast, so you'd have to look at a release
to make a relevant statement.

I hope this helped somewhat - but imho your question does just not make
too much sense, as you probably can't really do something with the
answer.

cheers
-- vbi

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