[Python-Dev] Python and Linux Standard Base

[Nick Coghlan]

On 27 June 2018 at 23:57, Charalampos Stratakis <cstratak at redhat.com> wrote:
> From: "Antoine Pitrou" <solipsis at pitrou.net>
>> One question: who maintains the LSB?
>>
>> The fact that the Python portion was never updated may hint that nobody
>> uses it...
>
> That could definitely be the case here. I stumbled upon that when checking shebang requirements on Fedora
> and apparently every distro has a sort of meta package that adheres to those standards. In Fedora's case [0].
>
> I don't have a good answer on who maintains it or even how compliant some distros are, but I was wondering
> if that topic came up beforehand and if any requirements were placed from either side.

My impression while working for Red Hat was that LSB ended up being
one of those bureaucratic standards that ended up sprawling so far
beyond being a minimal system, while still leaving core capabilities
that real world apps rely on underspecified, that compatibility and
compliance testing became sufficiently painful that folks that cared
about certifications started certifying a handful of major stable
distros instead (with a common modern selection being Ubuntu LTS,
Debian Stable, RHEL/CentOS, and SLES).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_Standard_Base seems to back up
that impression, with neither Debian nor Ubuntu claiming LSB support
at all these days.

Given the rise of Flatpak, Snappy, and Linux containers in general, it
may make sense to suggest that LSB drop Python entirely (similar to
what they did for Java, albeit for different reasons), and instead
recommend that portable applications requiring Python bundle their own
interpreter.

Cheers,
Nick.

-- 
Nick Coghlan   |   ncoghlan at gmail.com   |   Brisbane, Australia