Re: Question About Becoming LSB Certified..?!

[Andrew Josey <ajosey@rdg.opengroup.org>]

For compliance testing versus certification the technical steps
are as follows:

1. Get the list of authorized test suites from the certification
authority
http://www.opengroup.org/lsb/cert/docs/testsuites.html

This points to where the test suites can be downloaded from,
they are freely available via ftp. Binaries are run for
certification testing, the sources are available via cvs
(see http://www.linuxbase.org/test/ for more details on the
test suites, sources, cvs tree and FAQ)


2. You can use the Guide to Certification from 
http://www.opengroup.org/lsb/cert/docs/LSB_Certification_Guide.html
to understand what you need to do for testing (the test
campaign definition), which suites and
what it means to pass, which result codes need to be resolved.
Probably just look at the section on Formal testing and Test Campaign
sections and you may also want to look at the runtime test FAQ on 
http://www.linuxbase.org/test/
(you'll see from the guide that there is more than just testing
for formal certification)

(as an fyi, you can view an overview of what is involved in a
formal certification submission, at
http://www.opengroup.org/lsb/cert/docs/certprimer/ )

You'll want to visit the LSB Application Battery and read
the section on certification, since testing a runtime involves
running two applications from the battery -- its also useful
if you are planning to write LSB conforming applications and
want to see some examples.

3. Test your product. If there are failures then they need
to be resolved via a granted problem report in the Certification Problem
Reporting system, a searchable database at
http://www.opengroup.org/lsb/cert/PR/

The certification fees are for the administrative services of operating
the program, the web certification system, processing
submissions, processing the problem report database etc. Unfortunately
we do have to pay our staff salaries.  We developed and contributed a large
part of the runtime test suites to the program.

I understand that there are plans for a "compliance register" for claims of
self tested compliance to be logged, to be
established by the Free Standards Group, although we'd need to
hear officially from them on that one.

regards
Andrew