confcall summary Feb 4 2003

Topics relating to lsbsi
(the call drifted a little bit :-)

This fills in some details that were not
explicitly stated in the call, as they'd
been covered sporadically in various bits
of email and the attendees were familiar
with it.

Status:

The lsbsi is built for all three architectures,
and works "about the same" on all three. The
ppc32 has some additional runtime test failures,
these need to be analyzed.  At least some of
these are known to be kernel issues (esp. the
*context routines), and not lsbsi problems.
Further analysis needed on ppc32.

Since the previous call, two packages were 
updated to those in most common use (tar and
findutils), even though those are technically not
"released" - both originated on alpha.gnu.org.
With this change, the baseline failure count
is 47, all I18N, and nearly all from textutils.
These will not be fixed for the initial release,
and will instead be documented. The LSB in general
has an action to contact the upstream maintainers
on these issues.

The three add-on packages all work now:

* The uml package will also be available as a 
packaged rpm with a configure script and a launcher
script, which is more convenient than trying
to construct an environment from the various
pieces.  A Debian package for the same is pending.
The uml environment only makes sense where there's
a working uml for that architecture, which is
currently only ia32.

Testing lsb-runtime-test inside the ia32 uml had
some additional failures, these seem to be either
uml bugs, or timing things that are probably
inherent due to the the emulation layer involved.

* The bootable package requires a user to supply
an appropriate kernel, modules, module config
file, and if necessary an initrd.  If an initrd
is used, a /initrd directory must be created.
(This will be included in the instructions).

* The test package has not changed recently, and
is the basis of all runtime-test results.


The appbat packages have been tested inside the
lsbsi on each of the platforms.  There were some
failures, but these are understood.  Two were due
to the lack of some required network (/etc/hosts)
setup.  The remaining issue that is not yet
resolved is the pam-based authentication in samba.
This looks like it *may* be an issue on Itanium; 
there seems to be no issue with ia32 and ppc32 is
unknown as of this writing.


Things to do for release:

1. Better documentation on setup of the test
add-on (needs to include some steps related to
networking), and documentation on setup and use
of the other two add-ons.

2. Complete verifying that PAM is actually
working, there have been some confusions with
the lsb-samba appbat package, which is designed
to exercise PAM.

3. Add some steps to the UML configure and
launcher scripts to get the network back to
the host system set up, and to prompt for the
desired memory size.


Mats