| From: Stewart Russell via talk <talk@gtalug.org> | I just did the 22.04 upgrade thing, and it seems that Firefox will be held | at v 99 if you don't have snapd. So beware of old/held packages as you | update.
Wow. But it makes some kind of sense. The point of snap is to allow the packager to ignore changes in the environment: the package contains much of its environment. If a distro decides to distribute a snap to reduce the maintenance burden, why would they also distribute a non-snap version. That just increases the burden. Software distributors that don't own a distro have a much more valid reason for using snap: they have no control over changes to the distro. ==> I see no upside in distros distributing things as snaps (unless they are just passing on a snap that someone else created) Another downside of snaps: any bugs, including security bugs, in shared libraries requires the distro to update the library AND the snap publisher to rebuild the snap. What are the chances of that working out well? | Another delightful thing I found is that Ubuntu took its very own special | path in the "Sensible things to do in the Python 2 / Python 3" debacle: | remove Python 2, but don't link python3 to python. Move fast and break | stuff is very tiring when you're constantly getting beaten up like this. Looking on this from afar: is there a right way to do this? Is there a conventional wrong way to do this? From a purist standpoint, one cannot know what is meant by "python". If code uses "python", maybe it requires manual intervention to disambiguate what exactly was meant by it. This python2 => python3 transition is a decade-long source of horror and humour to a spectator. It's a common story of bad engineering, writ large. Anecdote: In the FreeS/Wan project, we changed the config file semantics. At the same time, we added a declaration to the config file to specify which version the config file conformed to. Good future-proofing, I thought. A successor project ripped that declaration out. So changes in config file semantics (rare or small) require manual intervention by the user, with no automatic warning. --- Post to this mailing list talk@gtalug.org Unsubscribe from this mailing list https://gtalug.org/mailman/listinfo/talk
