[daniel at freedesktop.org: Timeline, and slippage]

[Owen Taylor]

On Fri, 2004-07-30 at 20:42, Daniel Stone wrote:

> One proposal is that they are all part of the platform, but the platform
> is split in two: libraries, and specifications. Distributors who want to
> be platform-compliant must ship all the libraries in sufficient version,
> and software must comply to all the standards relevant to it in order
> for the product to be platform-compliant.

To me, compliance with a interapplication protocol specification is
quite a different thing than compliance with a set of libraries.
Speaking roughly:

 Distribution complies with a library set:

   Distribution provides all libraries in the library set and
   all public symbols in the upstream versions of those
   libraries. Libraries pass relevant test suites.

 Application complies with a library set:
 
   Basically meaningless. The LSB has a strong definition
   here that an application *only* links to libraries in the
   LSB but that isn't something we will be promoting for
   freedesktop.org.

 Distribution complies with a specification version:

   Basically meaningless. You could say that all applications
   in the platform that claim to support the specification
   version inter-operate with each other and other applications
   supporting the specification version, but that's not
   practically testable.

 Application supports a specification version:

   If the application claims to support the specification version
   then messages specified in the specification version must
   be used with the parameters and semantics in the specification..
   Messages exchanged that are not specified in the version
   must be exchanged in such a way that they won't conflict
   with specified messages or messages that might be specified
   in the future.

But for a distribution to claim "we support freedesktop.org 
specifications release 3" is an unlikely claim... every
application isn't going to support every feature of every
specification. (*) So this means the goal of the specification
release is inherently different from that of the platform
release.

Regards,
					Owen

(*) This does depend somewhat on the specification; the menu
    specification is, e.g., something that it does make sense
    to say whether a distribution supports. We might want to
    list support for certain specifications as part of the
    platform.

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