On Tue, May 07, 2002 at 04:18:13AM -0500, Chris Lawrence wrote: > On May 07, Marcus Brinkmann wrote: > > The LSB is necessary to avoid diversity among GNU/Linux distributions. > > There is only one GNU system, as such no diversity, and all of what the LSB > > specifies as far as I have seen it (I have not made a thorough analysis) is > > simply defined by the one implementation of the GNU system. > > No, the purpose of the LSB is to provide a standard ABI and API for > applications to link and program against, whether or not the > underlying system has the Linux kernel or not.
It has a strange name for that purpose. Is it just a misnomer? Is the purpose only to run applications that are within the scope of what the LSB defines? What about programs like CD burner software, audio applications and other programs that use kernel-specific ioctls? Are the ioctl interfaces defined in the LSB? > For example, one could take LSB binary packages of GNOME, KDE, > Mozilla, or OpenOffice and run them on any LSB-compliant system > without any changes. I think this is a bit optimistic :) but I see what you mean. For a wide range of application, this would even be correct. > If the Hurd includes a Linux emulation layer, which I believe has been > the intention of the GNU project since the Linux kernel became > reasonably popular, Well, it is certainly possible, and it is not even costly. In fact, at some day our glibc might be ABI compatible to the *-*-linux-gnu ABI, and at this day we would be LSB compliant without an emulation layer. The emulation layer is only strictly necessary for syscalls, and things like ioctl (and maybe for bug-by-bug compatibility with functions like nice(), where glibc did not behave as specified by POSIX... things like that). > then it is reasonable to provide the LSB > functionality so LSB packages can run on top of it. (Matter of fact, > the Hurd's vaunted capabilities of creating process-specific views of > the filesystem would make this easier to do than running on top of > many other systems; if it links against /lib/ld-lsb.so.1, run it in > the LSB environment.) I have absolutely nothing against providing such a layer of some sort. Maybe I just misunderstood Wichert, but when he spoke of a fork of Debian within Debian, I don't think he meant that emulation layer. > Similarly, if the *BSD ports progress, and there is a Linux emulation > layer available, there is no reason why LSB compatibility cannot be > achieved. There are no technical reasons, I agree. Thanks, Marcus -- `Rhubarb is no Egyptian god.' Debian http://www.debian.org [EMAIL PROTECTED] Marcus Brinkmann GNU http://www.gnu.org [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.marcus-brinkmann.de -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
