On 06/15/2016 08:29 PM, Tim wrote:
Allegedly, on or about 15 June 2016, Patrick O'Callaghan sent:
http://arstechnica.co.uk/information-technology/2016/06/ubuntu-snap-app s-are-coming-to-distros-everywhere-bye-apt-yum/
At first glance this looks really interesting and will be available on Fedora, though according to the article RedHat haven't yet decided to support it officially.
At first glance, this looks appalling!
.... Applications often require a lot of dependencies, making things more complicated, for example, when one application needs one version of another piece of software and a second application needs a different version of that other piece of software "Snap packages solve this problem by creating self-contained packages," we noted in our review of Ubuntu 16.04, which brought snaps to servers and desktops. "With snap packages, applications are installed in their own container, and all the third-party applications are installed with them so there are no version conflicts.Which means some of these things are going to be huge. The point of shared libraries is efficiency. Just wait to you install a dozen things that required Java, for instance, and they all decide that they need to bring in their own, rather than use a system installation.
If I understand what you're saying, I don't think it's that bad. When you pull in your first snap snapd loads a minimalistic version of your distro, then loads the snap. After that the "core" snap accumulates the bits and pieces, the dependencies, etc. so you build up a system with only the pieces you require. Think dung beetle versus feedlot.
After POC brought it up I started exploring. I have some ubuntu 16.04's VMs and didn't even know about this project. Using "snap find" came up with a list of 84 apps. So there are not a lot there yet but some of what was there was pretty interesting.
The basic pieces are server, snapd, client, snap, and builder, snapcraft. Everything lives in a "parallel universe" so there are no conflicts with your original host system.
I'm going to reserve judgement until I get a better feel for it but so far I like the concept. I can't compare it to Flatpak yet. That one's new to me to.