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RE: name: GNU/Cygwin system


LSB is not just about binary compatibility; it's also about 
file hierarchies, configuration mechanisms, and utilities 
for installation and maintenance.

I'd like to bring attention to standardisation of XML
resources.

Some packages are more or less architecture-independent, 
e.g., TeX/LaTeX formats and SGML/XML DTDs. Keeping in line 
with LSB minimizes the porting effort. While there's an 
established way to handle TeX resources, things are not 
quite sorted out for SGML/XML. A proposed standard for 
installation and maintenance of SGML resources [1] didn't 
make it into the LSB 1.1. The standardisation effort was 
recently restarted [2]. 

XML and data- and transaction-oriented applications must 
now be taken into consideration; the original proposal 
was strictly SGML-and-document oriented (and focused 
rather narrowly on DocBook). This has been discussed and 
is, to the best of my knowledge, acknowledged.

Just as XML is not just about documents, it's also rather 
promiscuous about platforms. Java is very important in 
this respect, but Cygwin might also play a role here. 
Cygwin seems to be popular with some of the XML hot-shots 
when they for some reason or another have to work on 
Win32 boxes. 

I'm afraid I can't offer much more -- except that I think 
we should continue discussing such matters here and on 
the cygwin-apps list.

kind regards
Peter Ring


[1] http://people.debian.org/~mrj/lsb-sgmlspec_cvs20020308/index.html
[2] https://lists.dulug.duke.edu/mailman/listinfo/lsb-xml-sgml

-----Original Message-----
From: Charles Wilson [mailto:cwilson@ece.gatech.edu]
Sent: 17. maj 2002 18:49
To: Michael Smith
Cc: cygwin@cygwin.com
Subject: Re: name: GNU/Cygwin system


<snip />

To tell you the truth, I don't see there being much hope -- or reason 
for -- the LSB to take cygwin into account.  Thanks to various 
microsoftisms, we're too weird.  Non-ELF shared libraries split into 
"runtime" and "linktime" pieces.  Runtime loader works completely 
differently than ld.so, so library versioning is handled completely 
differently.  Then, we have two different windowing systems..."native" 
and "X" which must coexist.  The best I can see is for cygwin to take 
what LSB does, and try to follow it as best we can while making 
allowances for the uniqueness of the platform.  We are the best ones to 
judge where those allowances must be made -- not them.  While the linux 
distributors can (eventually) reach a compromise position that all linux 
distributions can follow, there is no "compromise" here -- they'd have 
to put "special case exceptions" in their document specifically for 
cygwin.  But there's no need to uglify the LSB with all that:

What is the main purpose of the LSB?  Binary interoperability, so that 
third party software vendors can ship ONE package that is guaranteed to 
work on every LSB-compliant Linux platform.  Doesn't really apply to 
cygwin...and oh, yeah, how does RMS feel about making life easier for 
proprietary (possibly closed source) vendors?  Would he want the name 
GNU associated with THAT?

<snip />

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