Here's an update reflecting "future plans" as I thought I understood them.
Phase3 will be scrutinized and cleaned of any further things found not to be needed by the LSB spec so that the output of this phase is the minimal set. At the least, this will involve dropping the kernel build from the phase 3. It will add a package "lsb" which will provide misc. files not provided by any of the packages but required by the LSB (for example, install_initd and remove_initd), and which, when installed, will also mean the RPM database will be correctly initialized and will provide the required "lsb" resource. A new phase4 will construct up to three different release bundles that can be used for platform testing. Some of these bundles may not be applicable to all architectures. 4a: adds programs and files which are necessary to run the test suites in a pure chroot environment 4b: adds a kernel and startup scripts to make a bootable distribution. 4c: adds necessary support to run using User Mode Linux (confusingly referred to by the acronym UML which to most of us means something quite different). User Mode Linux is only well-supported under ia32; there's been some porting work on a ppc version but the prospects don't look too good at the moment and the ia64 version is considered "moribund" (sheesh). This means that there will essentially be four release bundles for each architecture. Currently I don't have a really good feel that we've dealt with all the architecture-indpendence issues yet.
