Ubuntu's Desktop-Next Switching From .DEBs To Snappy

[rdnetto]

My systems have diverged so far from stock Ubuntu that conversion to a package-incompatable version of Ubuntu would require not only a reinstall, but also conversion of every package I have built myself from source and days of tracking down all changes. It would be as difficult as converting to a totally different distro and repacking all my locallly build binaries to their format. If I have to do all that, I was thinking I might be better off with Gentoo than Ubuntu since I build so much from source these days anyway. At last count I've got 65 locally built packages on my system, including ffmpeg and my entire MATE-Gtk3 DE. I've had more than that when I was using locally built Kdenlive.

Does anyone know of a way to make Gentoo's source based updating system work with an existing install of a different distro to convert it to a source-based distro with automatic update management?

Ubuntu and Gentoo have some significant differences in terms of where to put various files, so this is obviously a really bad idea given the likelihood of one overwriting config files from the other, and is definitely in the realm of 'unsupported'. However, if you still want to try it (and have good backups), it's pretty easy to do. A Gentoo stage 3 install can be performed from any distro - just grab the tarball and extract it into your rootfs. i.e. over your existing distro. (You might want to exclude some files. e.g. the fstab template) That will you give you portage, which you can use to install anything else you need. You should probably uninstall as many Ubuntu packages as possible first though, to avoid issues. Portage will tell you if its overwriting files it doesn't recognize as belonging to a package, but that's very much an after the fact notification.

However, I think a much better idea would be doing a clean install of either Sabayon or Gentoo. Sabayon lets you mix binary and source-based packages, so it's not that different to what you're doing already, except that it keeps both package managers in sync so that dependencies, etc. work nicely. Which you choose comes down purely to whether you want more control (Gentoo) or are happy to accept the default USE flags on most packages in exchange for not needing to compile everything (Sabayon).

At last someone who understand the advantages of Snappy!

Now to be honest :

- if you ONLY stick to official software it has low benefit and .deb is just perfect (~80% of users)

- BUT whenever you do need proprietary softwares (from Oracle, VmWare and others) the .deb is a mess because if it not created for your distro AND version you will never ever get it working

I went so many times into errors like "requires libffs.1.6 but only libffs1.59 is available". So you download another version, force and then you have a really really hard time... because you broke 296 dependencies and softwares.

Included libraries will make both small devs and big companies happy!

(btw can we please stop Canonical / Steam / shaved-man automatic bashing)

In my experience, the Debian-based distros have more fragile dependencies than say, Gentoo. Gentoo has a concept of package slots which allow you to have multiple versions of a library installed side by side. For example, I currently have versions 1.2, 1.5, and 1.6 of libpng installed. This significantly alleviates some of the dependency issues caused by proprietary or poorly maintained software only targeting a specific version. (It also helps that Gentoo typically keeps several different versions of each package in portage, which smooths out some of the problems caused by individual version bumps.)

The big downside to this is that it's a double-edged sword - when the proprietary software depends on a specific version, it's inevitable an old, out-of-date and vulnerable version. glsa-check tells me I have vulnerable versions of libpng and openssl installed, and the only package that depends on them is nvidia-drivers. (Although I suppose the silver lining here is that all the other packages are able to use the newer, secure version instead of the vulnerable one.)
Bundling libraries with packages will definitely make them easier to run, but it's going to be a nightmare in terms of security and maintainability, especially since most manufacturers aren't going to be doing new releases each time one of their libraries has a security patch.

[finalzone]

the reason its a huge load of work to port unity to other distros is because of redhat is blocking with their influence on gnome. gnome denied all patches, which inlcuded the freedesktop.org standards. so if you want to bring unity to arch, you need to patch a lot of gnome packages to be able to run unity. so beside canonical there is no one who can keep up with that effort of continously patching the gnome packages.

Those patches requires a lot of modified packages specifically for Ubuntu. It turned out most of them were nothing more than hacks which explain why port of Unity to other distributions were virtually abandoned.

[Cerberus]

There is a difference between installing something from a third party website or a third party repository like a PPA and installing something from an official distro channel, like the Ubuntu Store. The claim in this thread I reacted to was that anybody can now package software and upload it to the store, which is a pretty stupid idea.

It is likely that all "external" software will be in a different repository than the software in the official one, and the user will know he is installing something that is not from official repositories, or even more than two repositories, Official, Partners, Community, Personal (from people that used PPAs) etc, problem solved as every user would be aware from what repository the software comes. Also from what I know each uploader will publish under their own account, not just randomly stuff their applications in the Store, it is like that on the phone, you publish under your name, you must have contact information available, and a Launchpad account signed with PGP keys.