Isn't bundle all the system tools basically containers / Docker? Also
Appimage? I personally am OK with a lot of disk usage if I can just
download a file that's self contained and run it.
James Pulver
CLASSE Computer Group
Cornell University
On 06/30/2016 10:59 AM, Tom H wrote:
On Sat, Jun 18, 2016 at 2:33 PM, Nico Kadel-Garcia <nka...@gmail.com> wrote:
On Sat, Jun 18, 2016 at 7:09 AM, Tom H <tomh0...@gmail.com> wrote:
The first that I heard of snaps being available on non-Ubuntu systems
was on the fedora-devel@ list where the poster floated the idea of
banning snapd because it might get a first-to-market advantage over
flatpak, a more or less similar Red Hat and Gnome technology.
Which got shot down fast as a bad reason to reject the software.
Thankfully!
It's interesting (and depressing) to see otherwise rational people
lose the plot like this, just like many did regarding systemd or many
are here in the UK regarding Brexit.
Permit me to call "straw man argument fallacy" on this one. It was one
person on a mailing list, who was shot down very quickly. The many
reasons to dislike systemd's policies, practices, size, and creeping
featuritis are well documented and remain a risk. Take a look at the
threads when it tried to replace "/etc/resolv.conf" with an
inconsistently managed symlink into systemd's DHCP configurations, and
its more recent attempts to disconnect all background processes not
tied to a user session that are not directly managed by systemd.
Shall we break remotely run tmux, screen, ssh-agent, and nohup based
long-running backgrounded tasks with no warning and no logging? What a
magnificent idea, let's break stuff without telling anyone!!!!
My point about "losing the plot" wasn't just about the moron who
wanted to ban snap/snappy/snapd or whatever the actual package is
called.
There wasn't even one positive thing said, there wasn't any
fact-checking before saying "it sucks because of ...". It was an
unending attack on the technology because it originated at Canonical
and because it might pre-empt the use of RH's Flatpak.
The technology was intended as Ubuntu-only and, if Canonical/Ubuntu
are to be believed, people from other distros asked them about porting
snaps so they did some work towards that. And then there was a
premature press release...
resolv.conf: IIRC, the problem was that if you weren't using
systemd-resolved, you were left with a dangling symlink.
Disconnection of background processes: The current solution's an OTT
solution to what could easily be regarded as buggy Freedesktop and
Gnome software. No one brought up during the fedora-devel@ discussion
the possibility of creating a new systemd.special unit, logout.target,
that would kill all the misbehaving processes like pulseaudio,
evolution-*, ... at logout while allowing nohup & co to work as
intended, as the upstream dbus maintainer suggested when he opened
this can of worms. Whatever their other good and bad qualities, the
systemd developers have a special talent for pissing people off.
Ubuntu/Canonical created its own system for installing
self-contained apps a-la Android and iOS. AIUI, these apps are
confined on Ubuntu using AppArmor.
According to Mark Shuttleworth, non-Ubuntu developers asked whether
patches would be accepted to port snaps to other distros. So some
work's been done and it's resulted in the press release and all this
brouhaha.
I'm extremely leery of any system that tries to "bundle all the system
tools" to run packages. It might be usable for containers, but it
presents real library and package management problems for deployed
such working environments. The approach is very familiar: it used to
be done with chroot a lot, it's more recently been done with docker
and Vagrant, and I don't see any compelling need for more such tools.
There are people on this list who regularly ask about software that's
more recent than what's in SL's repos. Snaps/Flatpaks would simplify
their lives.
AFAIK, Android and iOS apps "bundle all the system tools." Given how
many of these phones are used in the world, isn't it enough of a proof
of concept for you?
