Linked by Eugenia Loli-Queru on Mon 7th Apr 2003 17:10 UTC
Today, Red Hat Linux 9 has been "officially" released to the masses via the FTP servers, and we host here a mini-interview with Matt Wilson, Manager, Base Operating Systems at Red Hat, Inc.
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I should probably clarify the comment from Matt about the LSB....
At the moment, the LSB provides some recommendations that you can use to build portable packages. Unfortunately, because there are no standards for package metadata, that means you can only depend on interfaces in the LSB. Because every app that's useful needs more interfaces than just that, you have to statically link it all. Because that sucks, nobody does it.
Yes, the lsbcc program isn't perfect, we know that, I'm wrestling with it at the moment in fact to try and get it to build a hello world GTK program. The general idea is sound, and the agreement is the important thing, but right now documentation on how to actually make use of this standard is practically none existant. Writing some (and perhaps some better tools) is on the todo list for us at autopackage HQ
To say that "there would be no dependancy problems if everybody used the LSB" is somewhat incorrect - there would be no dependancies. Doh. RPM is quite clearly designed to do dependancies in a very flexible manner, so Redhat obviously do believe they are useful. The number of CDs needed if all the packages were strictly LSB compliant would probably more than quadruple, that's being conservative.
Finally, the reason redhat don't ship with apt4rpm is QA issues, their customers tend to shout at them if things break, that is what they are there for, and apt-getting random packages from the net tends to break things. C'est la vie.