SpecificationGroup

From The Linux Foundation

The LSB Project's Specification Group (or "subproject") is responsible for the development and maintenance of the LSB written specification. It is also responsible for the development and maintenance of ISO/IEC International Standard 23360, the ISO LSB standard.

The specification group

manages the LSB database - see SpecDatabaseSchema
writes the specification
develops and maintains the toolchain used to produce the specification

Contributors to the written specification should familiarize themselves with the Docbook utilities and the information in WrittenSpecificationHowTo.

The current specification is here.

Books vs. Booksets

As described in WrittenSpecificationHowTo, the LSB project continues to use the terminology of Book and Bookset, originally taken from the DocBook concepts of the same name, but no longer uses the DocBook mechanism. As currently presented on the specification page, Booksets correspond to specification modules or module groups that have meaning to a consumer of the LSB specification. Some booksets are divided into components which could possibly be glued together in different ways; these are known as Books. A Book in this sense may not have any meaning as a distinct unit. Since we know this is a bit confusing in the abstract, here's an example:

LSB-Core is a Bookset, and a module; conforming applications can indicate that they use only the features of the lsb-core module by having the installable package for ia32 depend on `lsb-ia32-core`. In this sense, this is a user-visible unit.

The LSB-Core Bookset is made up of three Books: Elf (binary file formats), LSB (libraries and commands), and Packaging. For a consumer of the specification to worry about these as individual books makes no sense. However, the prospect exists that one of the books could be published as a separate entity (Elf or Packaging might make sense outside the LSB concept), or a bookset for LSB-Embedded might be glued together from the same Elf book, a slightly different LSB book that used a different library set, and an entirely different Packaging book.

In general, users certify to a Product Standard, which is essentially a wrapper calling out a number of modules. Each module is a bookset. Each module may contain one or more books. A book is a self-contained piece of a module, available to be published indepently if required.

The following picture may help to explain things:

[[[SpecificationGroup]]/Comments User Comments] [[Include(SpecificationGroup/Comments)]]

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