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Runtime Compliance
LSB v1.3 Compliance has been added to Sarge RC Policy in which section 5(p) states
(p) Linux Standard Base
Packages must not conflict with requirements of the LSB,
v1.3. (eg, if you provide a library specified in the LSB, you
must be compatible with the LSB specification of that library)
Basically, you should be LSB compatible. You can expect a bug
report to be filed if you're not, and if you don't know how to
fix the problem, you should email debian-lsb@lists.debian.org
for assistance.
Priority of efforts for a given LSB release,
- Test unstable and file bugs for test failures
- Fix all the LSB bugs in unstable
- Make sure fixed packages are propagating into testing
- Backport fixes to stable release(may require a lot of work and/or conflict with stable release criteria)
Version priorities,
- Work to support LSB 1.3 Runtime
- Review 1.9 specification for any needed changes
- Work to support 2.0 once test suites are available
Runtime Certification
LSB certification requires that a particular set of bits aka "product" be submitted for certification. While Debian could submit something like "Debian 3.0r1 plus this extra set of packages" restricting our submittals to official Debian release means that this "product" is easy to reproduce and reference. For official releases CD images are produced and official checksums of those images are published. Advantages of this are,
- Any user can verify that they have the same set of bits that was certified.
- Makes certification easier since the Certification Authority(CA) can just do a normal install, install the extra "lsb" package, and run the tests. Less risk of something going wrong requiring an exception or resubmittal.
- We may want third parties shipping Debian to be able to take advantage of the "Re-branded Products" section #7.4 of the LSB Certification Policy Document. This would allow Debian CD distributors to license the LSB brand and use it on their products without redundant retesting(a waste of engineering effort and money).
Once confident that a release is compliant, it will be submitted to the CA. One difference about Debian and certification is that, unlike other commercial distributions, Debian can't "stop ship" of a particular release. By the time Debian has a "product" to submit for certification, it's already been released. This means that Debian needs to be extra diligent in testing before release. Debian might be able to pursue submitting an early version of a release for certification, but would need to ask the CA.
The FSG Certification page
Application Development
The goal is to make Debian the preferred LSB application environment. This means,
- packaging upstream development tools
- packaging upstream testing tools
- providing task packages to make obtaining an LSB application development environment trivial
Architecture Support
- Support all architectures officially supported by upstream for which a Debian release exists. Currently i386, ia64, powerpc, s390.
- Lead development of support for Debian supported architectures for which upstream support is not yet available.
LSB related packages available in Debian unstable,
lsb - Linux Standard Base 1.3 core support package (also contains documentation on how the lsb is implemented on Debian)
lsb-release - LSB release command
lsbdev-guide- LSB Application Developers' Guide
lsb-rpm - Red Hat package manager for LSB package building
lsbdev - Linux Standard Base development environment
lsbappchk - Linux Standard Base application compliance checking tool
Running the LSB test suites on Debian.
The eventual goal is to support all Debian architectures, but the current focus is on the architectures for which archLSB specifications, test suites, and certification programs exist in the upstream LSB project.
If you have additional results please send them for inclusion on these pages.
- Run test suites on all targeted architectures and send status reports and test suite results(or a url for the results) to debian-lsb.
- Look at the source for failing tests and figure out what's wrong. The test modules are in cvs here.
- file bugs when tests fail and report them on debian-lsb.
- fix bugs
- backport fixes to old releases and make patched packages available
LSB bugs in the BTS. This list is updated by hand so please point out lsb bugs on debian-lsb.
debian-lsb mailing list
Thread on making woody LSB compliant.
Matt Taggart's debconf2 talk Linux Standard Base and Debian July 7, 2002
Anthony Towns' old backported LSB packages Aug, 2002
Matt Taggart <taggart@debian.org>