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I'm not quite sure how to feel about this. On one hand an OS-level SDK (that isn't directly tied to the kernel or glibc) feels grossly overdue, and I'm not sure how you'd go about doing this in a way that is distribution-agnostic. On the other hand, tying your development to a single distribution is quite the antithesis to Linux and doesn't seem to be in the best interest of anyone, including those using the SDK.

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It'd be a pain at first, but look at other APIs like a database ORM that supports MySQL, Oracle, MS SQL. The commands to the end-developer are all the same for any of the platforms, but the underlying API can use any of the supported database engines.

If the Ubuntu API were done right, it could be ported, to say, Fedora, and use any underlying fedora libraries without the end-developer having to change her code at all! It could be extremely useful. You'd have a Linux API that can source the best API to use for the end-users current configuration.

You've just described KDE, Gnome and a suite of other graphics toolkits. Do we really need another one in the mix?

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