Linux Standard Base (LSB) Development Kit for application building/porting

The Linux Standard Base (LSB) specifies the binary interface between an application and a runtime environment. This paper discusses the LSB Development Kit (LDK) consisting of a build environment and associated tools to assist software developers in building/porting their applications to the LSB interface. The developers will be able to use the build environment on their development machines, catching the LSB porting issues early in the development cycle and reducing overall LSB conformance testing time and cost. The associated tools include the application and package checkers to test for LSB conformance of application binaries and RPM packages.

This paper starts with the discussion of advantages this build environment provides by showing how it simplifies application development/porting for LSB conformance. With the availability of this additional build environment from LSB working group, the application developers will find the task of porting applications to LSB much easier. We use the standard Linux/Unix chroot utility to create a controlled environment to keep check on the API usage by the application during the build to ensure 100% LSB conformance. After discussing the build environment implementation details the paper briefly talks about the associated tools for validating binaries and RPM packages for LSB conformance. We conclude with couple of case studies that demonstrate usage of the build environment as well as the associated tools described in the paper.