lsbsi Jan 7, 2003 Confcall Notes

NOTE: effective Jan 14, the confcall will occur
one hour earlier (11am Mountain time, immediately
after the lsb-futures call).  Please update your
calendars accordingly.

Beta lsbsi bits have been uploaded to the
freestandards.org impl/beta/binary directory.
These are tagged 1.3b1, and are available for
ia32, ia64 and ppc32.  The "test" packages,
allowing the test suite to be used, still need
to be uploaded.   The impl/beta/source directory
will be updated soon.

After a review that the webpage adequately
describes what to do with the lsbsi and how
to use it, from the viewpoint of someone
who's not involved in this project, the availability
of this beta test will be announced soon. 

There are remaining i18n failures.  These will
be documented and left, for now; they may be
addressed in an update release later if there's
movement with the upstream sources, or if someone
suddenly finds time to work on the patches, many
of which are available from the team, but against
different versions of the upstream releases.

Testing is currently in progress with the latest
beta runtime test suites, results will become
part of the lsbsi release notes. Stuart and Mats
are both running these tests. The other main test
that has to occur is a cross-check that all the 
1.3 appbat packages install and run, for each 
architecture.  Marvin and Mats will work on this.

ia32 is already built on multiple distributions
and ia64 on at least two, so there's some confidence
of portability.  One additional ppc32 distribution
will be tested soon as a sanity check.

A strange new problem has cropped up with the
nALFS tool, it seems that in some circumstances,
if logging is turned on (perhaps affected by
one other flag), the child nALFS process dies.
Since avoiding "-l -v" seems to avoid the
problem this is low-priority at the moment.
Someone should file a bug (hint, hint).


There was also some discussion of a few minor tweaks
to make the "lsbsi-test" environment easier (mainly,
making sure an /etc/services file is present and
a few other setup tweaks); these will be added for
beta 2 (if there is one) or the final - they are
low-impact.

Nicer would be to have the lsbsi-test pretend to
"boot", as in starting init and kicking off a
login process.  This will be invesitated.

We'd also still like to get the UML lsbsi going.
This is back burner because it's not needed for
any testing/certification program, but would make
for a much nicer environment and package.