Linux Standard Base

Last week, I attended the Linux Plumber's Conference, a funny-sounding but very important conference.  My wife can't get the image of Mario and Luigi out of her head, but "plumbing" in this case concerns the flow of data between core parts of the Linux system, not the flow of water.

One of the important mini-conferences held there was the Audio Conference, run by Lennart Poettering.  A good portion of the miniconf was spent discussing good end-developer APIs for sound on Linux, or (more accurately) the lack thereof.  Lennart talked about his ideas, but was intentionally vague about many of them, promising to follow up later with some documentation.

Picking up where we left off last time…

The LSB spec invents things without consulting distros. Like the whole init scripts thing. But that’s not as bad as depending on RPM or requiring a specific layout.

So it looks like the project I’ve been laboring on has been getting some attention:

Ever thought it was difficult to write software for Linux? For multiple distros? InternetNews reports that the LSB is making a push for their next release (due out later this year) that should help make all that much easier.

Let’s take a trip down Memory Lane, shall we?

Back when we were still the Free Standards Group and OSDL, the FSG side of the house was hard at work on a developer portal that would help new Linux developers learn what they needed to write applications for Linux.  We eventually did a release, but it didn’t have many of the features we wanted, and integration with the tools we provide in the LSB was spotty and hard to use.  One thing led to another; the merger happened, and for a while, we were busy with lots of other important things, and the LDN fell by the wayside.

Recently, as part of the many antitrust/anti-competition legal actions they’re suffering under, Microsoft released specifications for the old Office binary file formats. As expected, they’re big and complex. Joel Spolsky (a former member of the Excel team) had some thoughts on their size and complexity:

The LSB Project has released a refresh of LSB 3.2 to address several issues not caught until after the release. Among these:

• The application checker would not accept -M arguments.
• Some of the X11 tests would crash on some platforms.
• A packaging bug caused some other X11 tests to fail.
• Some constants were missing from the SDK.

A complete list of bugs fixed in this refresh can be found on our bug tracker.

The LSB Project has released the Linux Standard Base 3.2.

New in this version: