Mats Wichmann (Intel) started my day with his tutorial on Building LSB Compliant Applications. (LSB ≡ Linux Standards Base, an application binary interface standard to support binary portability. POSIX and the Single UNIX Spec are application programming interface standards to support source code portability.) You want to use the LSB when can't or don't want to ship the source code for an application.
I bring a lot of bias and baggage here. I have lived through the UNIX vendor standards wars of the early 1990s, watched the failure of various cross architecture ABI efforts (AIM, Monterrey), and have been historically (hysterically?) sceptical of application branding or certification efforts. (There is no business model for the ISV for various technical, business, and customer reasons.)
That said, Mats did a great job of introducing the tools and development and test environments the LSB effort has developed to ease an application developers efforts. Without tripping any of my biases around actual app certification, he started with a simple "hello, world" style app to demonstrate the initial toolset, then scaled the demo up to a more complex effort to deal with the differences between the LSB use of dynamic libraries, your own application's shared libraries, and statically linked libraries.
Links:
- Building LSB Compliant Applications
- The Linux Standards Base website. Start crawling here to learn about the standard, the standards efforts, and the tools, etc.
- Mats will send me the link to his slides when they go up online.
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