The quick mention of the LSB spec led me to this fun Wikipedia page[0]. Apparently Red Hat once wanted to force Linux distros to accept gzipped RPM packages, as well as demand that things like CUPS were always installed. Attempts to comply with it were pretty much non-existent outside of the still used legacy lsb_release command and its associated configuration file, since Red Hat had apparently never actually considered whether or not anyone wanted to comply with it.

The entire thing is an ISO spec even, which is kinda baffling. Deprecation was also a mess, with it initially only being possible to remove things from the spec 3 major versions after the specs release (only for that to be violated with version 4.0->4.1 where they removed Java as an optional module that was required to be LSB compliant).

The entire thing went bust in 2015 due to lack of interest.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_Standard_Base

Lovecraftian horror as a file format. What a great article.

I had a look at when this article was posted on HN a few years ago. The comments are typical nitpicky HN comments like "but why did he want to make his own implementation" or "he didn't have to understand the file format, just use rpmbuild". How disappointing. As if half the stuff on HN isn't understanding/analysing obscure interesting crap that nobody outside of tech would ever care about.