[lsb-discuss] Does anyone care about LSB on arm?

[Jeff Licquia]

On 06/01/2011 07:25 AM, Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton wrote:
>   so in _that_ regard, the question becomes: "are the efforts of the
> free software community better off being spent elsewhere"?  and "what
> benefit is there *TO THE FREE SOFTWARE COMMUNITY* of doing LSB for
> ARM"?  forget the proprietary junkies, they'll suck anything from us
> that moves and not give a dime in return.

That seems to be my cue to provide the community case for the LSB.

The LSB provides several things to the community:

  - a framework for allowing Linux distributions to pool their userbase 
and work together as one platform instead of multiple platforms, one per 
distro

  - test suites which identifies both compatibility problems and 
outright bugs to be detected and fixed

  - a method for targeting builds at multiple distributions at once, 
both proprietary and free

  - reporting tools for finding portability problems in built apps, 
again for both proprietary and free apps

We currently provide all of this for 7 architectures.  ARM benefits 
indirectly (for example, many of the compatibility breaks detected on, 
say, x86_64 will affect all archs equally), but indirect support doesn't 
include the tools we've developed, and often compatibility issues are 
arch-specific.