Areas that the Linux Standard Base Does Not Currently Address

Because the LSB does not (yet) address several areas of difference among the Linux distributions, the task of designing and implementing an LSB-Compliant application is still a difficult one. The following items are some examples of areas that, if added to the LSB specification, would hopefully ease the burden on application vendors:

• Consistent Package Naming and Versioning Scheme - This would allow package dependencies to work correctly across distributions (e.g., the nfsutils package on SuSE is nfs-utils on other distributions).
• Internationalisation and Localisation - While there are several standards that define consistent library interfaces for localisation and internationalisation, each distribution has a different location and method for specifying localisation policies.
• System Administration - Each distribution has its own set of system configuration files and directories (e.g., /etc/config.d, /etc/sysconfig, /etc/rc.config). There are also distribution specific tools for modifying these files (e.g., turbo*config, SuSEconfig, linuxconf). These differences place an undue burden on vendors who wish to release their software on several distributions, since programmers, testers, and support engineers must learn how to correctly administer each distribution using system administration tools that are unique to that distribution.