After running into a few small problems in getting the latest sample implementation to work properly in time for LinuxWorld Expo last week (thanks for Ralf for resolving my problems), I decided to do some simple testing on several distros to see what issues there might be. My testing involved building rsync in lsbdev and then trying to run it under the sample implementation. For the five distros I tested rsync ran just fine, but I did run into problems and/or nuisances when installing the sample. Here are details of my results.
======================= 1. Debian Woody - October 10, 2001 version Installing under Debian worked just fine with the exception of one small warning. When the man-lsb package is being installed it gives a warning about user "man" not existing on the system and user "root" will be used as the owner for /usr/bin/man instead. 2. Redhat 7.2 Enigma This is the distro I have loaded on my laptop and the one I was using for my LinuxWorld presentation. It also ended up being the most difficult installation. Several problems were encountered and two workarounds were required to complete installation. The first problem was the rpm on Redhat not allowing installation of most of the RPMs due to interdependencies, even though the "--depends" option was being used. It appears the version of Redhat I am using does not handle this flag properly. To get around this problem I needed help from Ralf. He sent me the /usr/bin/rpm command from the Caldera distro. I loaded it on my system and modified the mkLSBdist script to use it instead of the rpm commad on Redhat. Unfortunately, the Caldera rpm would not run in this state. It complained about not being able to find some files in the /usr/lib/rpm-3.0.6 directory. To work around this problem I created a symbolic link from /usr/lib/rpm to /usr/lib/rpm-3.0.6. Once these two problems were addressed, the installation completed, but with lots of warning messages. When installing the DEV-lsb package it gave 1726 warnings about the group "operator" not existing on the system and group "root" would be used as the group for many of the files in the package. I also got the same error as the Debian installation about user "man" not being there. 3. Caldera OpenLinux Server 3.1 Installing the sample on Caldera succeeded with no warnings or errors. This shouldn't be too big of a suprise since the sample is based on Caldera. 4. SuSE 7.3 Installing the sample on SuSE succeeded, but it had similar warnings about groups not existing. In addition to reporitng the lack of group "operator" when installing DEV-lsb, it also reported no group "games" existing. Other than that, everything went fine. 5. Turbolinux Server 7.0 Esprit Installing the sample on Turbo was similar to the results for SuSE. In this instance it reported group "operator" and user "man" not existing on the system. ======================= In summary, I think the latest version of the sample implementation is in pretty good shape. It just needs a little polishing to avoid nuisance warning messages about groups and users missing on a system. Additionally, a little more investigation should be done to determine why the rpm on Redhat can't handle "--depends". Regards, Marvin Heffler Linux Standard Base and Developers Toolbox IBM Linux Technology Center 11400 Burnet Road, Zip 908-1A33 Austin, TX 78758 (512) 838-0953 T/L 678-0953
