Snappy Packaging Happenings In The Fedora, Arch Space

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Snappy Packaging Happenings In The Fedora, Arch Space

This week Canonical hosted a Snappy Sprint in Heidelberg, Germany where they worked to further their new package management solution originally spearheaded for Ubuntu Touch. This wasn't an Ubuntu-only event, but Canonical did invite other distribution stakeholders...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Snaps-Fedora-Arch-More

[SpyroRyder]

And thus we find the biggest problem with Canonical sponsored things, they don't send the code upstream for an obscenly long time. Thus if you want to use most canonical projects on Arch you have to download a number of patched versions of pacages you already have. And this can then break the rest of the normal packages on your system.

[justmy2cents]

I know that the [Fedora] Workstation WG is very much behind Flatpak right now, but I see no reason that we cannot offer both. In fact, it is in the best interests of our users to fully enable both systems to the best extent we can, so that they have the freedom to develop and use applications as they see fit.

i wonder if this cuts both ways, aka. ubuntu providing default support for flatpak as well. if it doesn't it is just nonsense aimed to promote their own package that should be ignored until it does stand for that

providing both OTB everywhere would in fact be best outcome possible ever, but unless everywhere includes ubuntu, it might as well be better to decide it with package wars

[boxie]

good to see that both snappy and flatpack both have interesting futures ahead of them. I for one am looking forward to my secure Linux desktop of the future...

[Piko]

Is there some advantage that Snappy brings over Flatpack, from a technical standpoint? Also how do both of these cross distribution packaging methods compare to the already proven AppImage format? I've been packaging several application for redistribution using AppImage and find it's simple design along with no dependencies from a host other then they have to be able to run an ELF to be fantastic. I do have one issue with AppImage and that's the fact that it unloads it's disk image space into temp storage which can lead to a slow starting time for an application that hasn't been run especially if you are using AppImage to package something like a video game. How do these other packaging solution get around those slowdowns while still ensuring the user can't easily or accidentally modify the contents of the authored application?

[amehaye]

IIUC Canonical controls the 'server side' (a.k.a App Store) of Snaps. If that's indeed the case, I fail to understand why Fedora or any other distribution should support snaps. Anyone cares to shed some light?

[Cerberus]

IIUC Canonical controls the 'server side' (a.k.a App Store) of Snaps. If that's indeed the case, I fail to understand why Fedora or any other distribution should support snaps. Anyone cares to shed some light?

https://insights.ubuntu.com/2016/06/24/howto-host-your-own-snap-store/

Not true, you can create your own "store" easily for distributing snap packages

[Cerberus]

i wonder if this cuts both ways, aka. ubuntu providing default support for flatpak as well. if it doesn't it is just nonsense aimed to promote their own package that should be ignored until it does stand for that

providing both OTB everywhere would in fact be best outcome possible ever, but unless everywhere includes ubuntu, it might as well be better to decide it with package wars

Ubuntu has Wayland in its repositories so there is no problem with having flatpak support too. Like Wayland and Mir, they will coexist.

[justmy2cents]

Ubuntu has Wayland in its repositories so there is no problem with having flatpak support too. Like Wayland and Mir, they will coexist.

if i read correctly this was OTB proposal, not in some repositories. both OTB would definitely be best possible outcome if only this was done by all major distros.

[Cerberus]

if i read correctly this was OTB proposal, not in some repositories. both OTB would definitely be best possible outcome if only this was done by all major distros.

They will certainly enable it, there is no reason not to, I believe all distributions will support both snaps and flatpaks, everyone will benefit from them.