Mike Hearn wrote:
I'm not aware of e.g. an LSB-1.3 application that doesn't run properly on any system that supports LSB-1.3. Are you?
I'm not aware of any LSB applications at all, actually. But let's take RealPlayer for example. Let's pretend that Real had made it an LSB app.
Would that have saved it from being broken by NPTL. No. LSB doesn't specify (as far as I'm aware) that LSB apps must be linked against LinuxThreads.
Bzzt. In the real world, the distro vendor would have noticed this during LSB certification, and since the shared library loader for LSB 1.3 is /lib/ld-lsb.so.1 rather than /lib/ld-linux.so.2, the vendor can easily force libc to be linuxthreads based even if the default libc is NPTL based.
I believe that as people start building LSB-compliant apps, they'll find it quite a useful way to avoid having to package ten different flavors of their apps just to be compatible. It's going to be a lot easier with LSB 3.0, since by that time the C++ ABI will have settled down, but I do think even LSB 2.0 is worth looking at for some applications.
Yes, I know, you'll probably want to post something bitter and negative about LSB in response, but I'm going to put my hands over my ears and go "la la la", so I won't notice whether you actually do :-) - Dan