Re: [Lsb-wg] opposition to LSB 2.0 rc1

[Jeffrey A Law <law at redhat dot com>]

On Fri, 2004-07-30 at 08:01, Michael Matz wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> On Thu, 29 Jul 2004, Alan Cox wrote:
> 
> > On Iau, 2004-07-29 at 22:05, anderson@freestandards.org wrote:
> > > It would not be possible to release an LSB aligned with gcc 3.4 at this
> > > time as it does not meet the rest of our release criteria, which can be
> > > found on our website at http://www.linuxbase.org/futures/criteria/index.html.
> > 
> > That strikes me as funny to say the least. The ficticious kind of gcc
> > 3.3 ABI currently proposed also fails the published criteria
> 
> Even if this is true, 3.4 has all the same problems, _additionally_ to not 
> being deployed widely.
I suspect GCC 3.4 will be more widely deployed than GCC 3.3 in the
not terribly distant future.

Maybe that's where the various groups differ.  LSB is probably doing
a pretty good job at targeting today's development environment.  I'm
looking at where we're going to be in 3-6 months lasting for roughly
a year or more.


> That LSB was sort of standardizing without involvement of the GCC 
> maintainers is indeed a problem.  But it gives no input to the "3.3 or 3.4 
> problem".  And I think this situation improved somewhat (LSB: please 
> remember this!).
It's worth noting that some of these issues were raised over a year
ago with the LSB group.  So what needs to be improved is how the
LSB responds to the developer community early in the process.


> Which community exactly?  There are different ones, with different wishes
> and goals.  
Very very true.


> There are at least three communities with incompatible goals
> (standardizing 3.3 vs. standardizing 3.4 vs. standardizing the current
> release). 
I don't think anything other than GCC 3.3 or GCC 3.4 would make any
sense at all for LSB 2.0.

>  One could only finally "solve" this by either not including C++
> at all in LSB (thus alienating _all_ communities), or including the union
> of all wishes (thus alienating all people who actually want to use the
> standard for work, because of it's size then).  Short of these extremes
> (which nobody wants IMHO) I think complete agreement is impossible to
> reach.
I'd rather see LSB come out and say the C++ runtime environment isn't
baked enough yet to include in LSB 2.0 than to push forward something
that has fundamental flaws.

Jeff