Re: opinions of snappy packages
2016-06-19 21:51 GMT+02:00 Zlatan Todoric <zlatan@riseup.net>:
>
> On 06/19/2016 09:12 PM, Raphael Hertzog wrote:
>>
>> [...]
>> This is an annoying habit for many of their projects and it might be a
>> part of the reason why many of their interesting projects do not really
>> take off.
>>
>> $ apt search snapcraft
>> Sorting... Done
>> Full Text Search... Done
>> $ apt show lxd
>> N: Unable to locate package lxd
>> E: No packages found
>>
>> Same for Unity and many other things that I would have tried when they
>> marketed them.
You can at least run Snappy stuff, see the snapd and
ubuntu-core-launcher packages in Debian. Building them doesn't seem to
be possible yet...
(but I haven't tried that)
> Also, comparing to Flatpak I don't see anything why I would choose snappy
> packages (and comparing Libreoffice Flatpak vs Libreoffice snap package is
> insane - I do not want suddenly all Linux packages start using my disk space
> because I just have it - I rather prefer having 10GB of system and 490GB for
> my data than 200GB of system vs 300GB for my data). Also it seems that
> Canonical wants to build central repository from where others should fetch
> snap packages while flatpak is openly distributed among people, distros etc.
I shamelessly advertise my bundling talk at Debconf for that :) One
part of it will be a quick walk through the main differences between
the bundling systems.
The Flatpak bundle would be about the same size as the Snappy one if
you would count the Flatpak runtime accompanying the LibreOffice
bundle. Fortunately, that big runtime is shared by multiple apps.
Limba is an attempt to have a modular runtime and strong validity
checks for bundles to apply a certain policy, but it has been less
popular than Snappy or Flatpak. IMHO Flatpak is a better solution
because it allows at least some sharing of libraries due to its
runtimes, and also allows great diskspace reduction due to its use of
OSTree (which deduplicates data automatically).
Although Snappy seems to have measures in place to reduce the size of
installations as well - I am currently reading up on Snappy, to be
able to comment on it better.
AppImageKit essentially requires you to bundle all the stuff (= huge
size), but it has the advantage of not needing anything installed on
the target system in order to run its applications, compared to all
other bundling systems.
All the bundling systems have their strengths and weaknesses,
unfortunately I think we will need to wait and see which of them will
stick - and ideally make sure upstreams follow some packager's quality
guidelines (hardening flags, correct install locations, maybe
reproducible builds, ...) when creating their bundles.
Cheers,
Matthias
--
Debian Developer | Freedesktop-Developer
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