From The Linux Foundation

Developer Tools

Summary presentation: OpenOffice Impress presentation

Attendees

Session leader(s)

• Marc J. Miller
• Robert Schweikert

Participants

• Alexey Khoroshilov
• Elijah Newren
• Laurent Rochette
• Darren Davis
• Gordon Hopper
• Dan Kegel
• Stew Benedict

Overview or Background Info

Discussion Points

LSB

LSB Developer Network, LSB Navigator (launches 6/15/2007) solves "no developer wiki", "distribution/application database"

• IBM and Novell have promised to contribute docs
• Need support from others
  • Red Hat?
  • Xandros?
  • Ubuntu?
  • X.org?

LSB solves develop for a single platform, except for RHEL3 (pre-LSB)

LSB Navigator at http://www.linux-foundation.org/navigator

MSDN has an advantage b/c always comes up in the same format. Better readability. Standardized wiki would help.

libstdc++ changes break apps

LSB development tools have a high learning curve

• Developers don't know where to begin
• If they've already designed for default development environment, how to convert to LSB-compliant?
  • LSB integration is already in the roadmap for OpenSUSE
  • Need Ubuntu to do the same thing
• How to find missing symbols
  • There are still some things missing
  • LSB documents what has been in use, and therefore always trails "real" development environments

"Automated testing tools"

• RAS DB framework is at least a partial solution
• Most distros have their own testing framework, unlikely that an open source generic one will further the adoption of Linux.

"Some libraries have no stability guarantees"

• That's why they're not in the LSB
• The development communities maintaining those libs need to stabilize, then they will be included in LSB
• Please use LSB libraries whenever possible for now

Everything else

RHEL3

• Won't be solved until Red Hat stops supporting RHEL3
• Chroot jail which supports RHEL3? Red Hat has already refused

Debuggers

• Tools
  • Frysk
  • GUI debuggers depend on GDB
  • GDB is broken, needs some TLC
    • TotalView as an alternative?
  • Eclipse has a great IDE & debugger
    • Need an LSB plugin
    • C++ portion needs some TLC
    • Has support from third parties (in the form of add-ins)
    • Has a GDB interface
• How to debug race conditions with multithreaded code?
  • Intel ThreadChecker is limited
  • Current reality of developing multithreaded code
  • Market opportunity

Multithreaded knowledge

• No tool can multithread an app for the developers
• Intel and AMD offer webinars on how to multithread code

Decisions/Conclusions/Actions

• LSB
  • Request LSB environment be installed by default. Presents recognition by distro that LSB is the single platform to develop for.
  • LSB/developer docs
    • Standardized wiki format to help Linux developers (dev docs)
    • Some more basic documentation regarding developing for LSB, sample code needs to be available. Example: http://developer.novell.com
    • Content needs to be easy to find
• GCC people, please stop changing libstdc++!
• Eclipse is the front-end IDE debug tool to embrace. Needs TLC for C, C++; has a GDB-like interface