Application certification (was Re: [Beowulf] hpl size problems)

[Chris Samuel]

On Thu, 29 Sep 2005 09:18 am, Joe Landman wrote:

> Worse, when closed source vendors ship product, they qualify against
> specific OSes, and will not officially support others.  Usually we get a
> "tell us if it works" perspective.

This is our experience too. Also in the extreme case we've been told that 
because we don't run the ISV's web server on the same node as the PBS server 
then we're in an unsupported configuration.

Even when I've shown them the bugs in (and supplied patches for) their Perl 
code.

> Somehow this seems wrong to me.  I would like there to be a standards
> body (say LSB?) that says "linux LSB vX.Y is defined thusly", and then
> have vendors qualify against that, regardless of the distro.

Agreed, this is what LSB was supposed to do, I believe.  However, nobody uses 
it, sadly.

There's a very good article at LWN about the LSB entitled "The relevance of 
the Linux Standard Base" at:

http://lwn.net/Articles/152580/

which is subscriber only content at the moment (if you can afford to subscribe 
I can wholeheartedly recommend it, their kernel development coverage 
justifies it for me on its own) but will appear as free content in the near 
future.

They also provide a link to Ulrich Drepper's (the glibc maintainer) blog post 
that goes into what he sees as fundamental problems with LSB at the moment, 
that's at:

http://www.livejournal.com/users/udrepper/8511.html

There is apparently one one application that has been LSB certified. :-(

Chris
-- 
 Christopher Samuel - (03)9925 4751 - VPAC Deputy Systems Manager
 Victorian Partnership for Advanced Computing http://www.vpac.org/
 Bldg 91, 110 Victoria Street, Carlton South, VIC 3053, Australia

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