John Goerzen wrote:
On Thu, Dec 16, 2004 at 10:43:37PM +0100, Wouter Verhelst wrote:Thus, the answer to the failure of the LSB is not "the Free Software people should be more helpful to the non-free people"; the correct answer is "the non-free people should be more helpful to the Free Software people".Very well written, Wouter. Thanks.
I agree.
One other possibility -- and I don't know if it's true or not -- is that the organization working on LSB is itself the problem.
As a person who has seen an ISV in action I think the main problem is that they know the software works with product X, version Y. What they do not know is which properties of the product they are using, so if a new version comes out they have no way of knowing if it will work. The fact the glibc is known for incompatible changes in its ABI is not helping...
Sun solves this by having a tool call appcert. http://developers.sun.com/solaris/articles/appcert.html it checks if the application only uses the "official" Sun API. Groetjes, Peter