I find it odd that the lsb spec includes something which I thought was declared explicitly outside its scope: packaging.
I thought the idea was that distributions would provide their own value add, that LSB was supposed to document the common facilities which should be present in a linux system -- primarily so that commercial vendors could deploy linux software for a variety of distributions. Proposal: specify that an lsb system be able to install a .tgz file and register it in its package database. The package represented by the .tgz file should not install if the file provides a file which is already present on the system. The package name under which the contents are registered should be some prefix of the .tgz file name. [Note that gnu tar deals with long file names in an acceptable fashion.] -- Raul
