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Comment by bbanyc | Hacker News Reader

The impression I get is that the main point of LSB was to combat FUD from commercial Unix vendors about Linux being fragmented and nonstandardized and lacking binary compatibility. Once Linux supplanted Solaris in the corporate world this all became unnecessary. Is this right?

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As someone shipping proprietary applications on Linux, the lack of binary compat is still not fun at all. In a previous gig, we ended up with 20 odd build slaves ({x86, x86_64} * Common RHEL, Ubuntu, Debian), and making binaries for each, rather than trying to make LSB based binaries.

What kind of problems did you have with trying to make common binaries? The old wisdom is that you can make it work by building against an old enough glibc (and maybe other conservative deps like base X libs) and then ship other libraries along with your binary.

Maybe this will help you: http://phusion.github.io/holy-build-box/

I was very excited until I saw: "Supporting graphical applications such as those based on GTK, Qt, SDL, OpenGL etc is outside the scope of this project."

xdg-app by GNOME solves this problem

https://wiki.gnome.org/Projects/SandboxedApps

It's already in a working state - you can try running GIMP nightlies

You just completely nailed it. Unix is now relevant, but only in niches, where as Linux used to only be relevant in niches.

To the point, the rest of the discussion here revolves around init scripts and the filesystem hierarchy, which are the only parts of LSB that anyone actually used. (And they're sticking around in Debian, at least for now.)

In theory LSB meant a vendor could ship an RPM that would work flawlessly on any Linux distro supporting that LSB release (which on Debian meant supporting RPM alongside DEB as a package format). In practice vendors would just target RHEL and/or Ubuntu and call it a day.

This whole discussion would suggest that it wasn't a FUD, but a genuine concern. And still is.

Well, that and making cut-and-paste work across X applications.

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