Linux is a pivotal project for the open source community and it stands for more than just software. It stands for freedom, more as in speech than beer, and community participation. However this has led to a plethora of distributions and their own ways of systems management, which can be a nightmare for developers to deploy and support. Linux has been traditionally supporting the whole source code, configure, make approach, which is cross platform. However, it is not usable for the layman who wants to adopt Linux. Nor is it any easier for the third party developers who want to provide software for all the distributions. Enter LSB. LSB is trying to make it practical to develop and deploy for multiple distributions through standards.
One of the important activities is packaging and deploying of software. Red Hat has RPM, K/X/Ubuntu/Debian has dpkg/apt, Suse has Yast and then there are third party management systems like Yum, Automatix or autopackage. A Linux developer has to provide these many options to truly reach out to users of these distributions. LSB is planning a cross-platform package API that will provide a common interface across distributions.
Murdock finds the closest existing analogy to the API in Real Network’s installation script, which identifies the packaging system, and then installs the files for RealPlayer to the appropriate locations. “What the standard will do is enable the installer at specific points in the script to call out to the package system,” Murdock says. “Instead of having to have specific knowledge about specific distributions, ISVs can simply rely on the LSB and the interfaces that the LSB will have present.” All that ISVs will need to know is whether a distribution is LSB compliant or not.
This will reduce the effort of third party developers and ISVs to support more distributions. More third party software will lead to more adoptions of Linux. The difficult part is going to normalization across all distributions. But once done, it will solve a lot of problems.
Ian Murdock has explained the problem and the solution on his blog, which has kicked off a nice discussion.
October 22nd, 2007 at 10:50 am
[...] Foundation is working towards some middle ground through the Linux Standard Base. Efforts like a cross-platform packaging API are trying to improve the compatibility. They even have a Developer Network to help those who are [...]
May 19th, 2008 at 9:57 am
[...] works, and the problems have been handled by the community. There is also some work being done to improve compatibility across distributions. However, even today, the packages are created and maintained by the community. To some extent the [...]