Mozilla To Begin Offering Firefox In Snap Format For Ubuntu

[duby229]

This is a valuable argument.
But the reality is that, statistically, library size is ridiculously small compared to data size.

If this thing takes off it won't be one library, it'll be almost every library for almost every app. Take Gentoo's firefox ebuild as an example, it allows you to build it with specific libraries internally or you can build it by pulling those same libraries in as system dependencies. If you build with system libraries it loads literally like 4-5 times faster. No joke. And firefox is only one example.

[Creak]

Happy to see I'm not the only one concerned about all these Snappy, XDG-App, and other Win-alike packaging systems.

I understand the usability of it, but I can't help it, it feels like a regression to me.

Edit: That being said, it is how Windows works (with DLLs everywhere in each directories in Program Files) and I admit that the loading time isn't such a problem. But the number of identical DLLs everywhere in this case is a real problem to me.

[duby229]

Happy to see I'm not the only one concerned about all these Snappy, XDG-App, and other Win-alike packaging systems.

I understand the usability of it, but I can't help it, it feels like a regression to me.

Edit: That being said, it is how Windows works (with DLLs everywhere in each directories in Program Files) and I admit that the loading time isn't such a problem. But the number of identical DLLs everywhere in this case is a real problem to me.

With snappy packages I doubt you'd see duplicates anywhere. I'm pretty sure it's a container. In that sense I don't think end users would see them. They will just be stuck wondering why the hell the disk led won't stop thrashing.

[starshipeleven]

If this system makes sense for most things but still does not implement some critical policies like "communication to outside the PC is ALWAYS done through system libraries (to ensure updates)" or whatever.

Also: do the containers stop the silly insecurity of Xorg, allowing apps to run truly isolated?

[Stoatally]

If this thing takes off it won't be one library, it'll be almost every library for almost every app. Take Gentoo's firefox ebuild as an example, it allows you to build it with specific libraries internally or you can build it by pulling those same libraries in as system dependencies. If you build with system libraries it loads literally like 4-5 times faster. No joke. And firefox is only one example.

I don't know about any of the other solutions, but for xdg-app it's not the case that every application has its own set of libraries. Instead each application references a runtime that contains needed libraries. This moves the burden of security updates to the mantainer of the runtime instead of the maintainer of the application and allows reduces the amount of redundant libraries loaded into memory.

[duby229]

I don't know about any of the other solutions, but for xdg-app it's not the case that every application has its own set of libraries. Instead each application references a runtime that contains needed libraries. This moves the burden of security updates to the mantainer of the runtime instead of the maintainer of the application and allows reduces the amount of redundant libraries loaded into memory.

I am a proponent of runtimes as long as they are maintained. You can't do anything about security issues except backports but that's ok.

[ferry]

Happy to see I'm not the only one concerned about all these Snappy, XDG-App, and other Win-alike packaging systems.

I understand the usability of it, but I can't help it, it feels like a regression to me.

Edit: That being said, it is how Windows works (with DLLs everywhere in each directories in Program Files) and I admit that the loading time isn't such a problem. But the number of identical DLLs everywhere in this case is a real problem to me.

Not that Windows has always worked like this. The installer used to update system libraries by newer versions, i.e. by replacing them. This worked because the abi was stable (needed to be because close source). Problems only occured when developers worked around bugs and limitations in libraries instead of getting them fixed, which of course broke when the lib got updated by latter applications installations. Now microsoft has just given up and installs multiple versions themselves.

All this is not typically a good thing, but more a failure of the closed source paradigm. In principle there should never be a need to use an old version of a library. Maintainers in the open source eco system spend a lot of time when developers deviate from this principle by making changes to libraries that are not backwards compatible, but are doing a great job to avoid duplicate code.

This improves performance and reduces security problems as mentioned earlier. Messing things up the microsoft way doesn't seem to be the best alternative when all the sources of libraries are available.

[Awesome Donkey]

That's all great and grand for Firefox, don't get me wrong, but what about Thunderbird? No love there?

[starshipeleven]

If this system makes sense for most things but still does not implement some critical policies like "communication to outside the PC is ALWAYS done through system libraries (to ensure updates)" or whatever.

Also: do the containers stop the silly insecurity of Xorg, allowing apps to run truly isolated?

Answering myself: Nope. Xorg is still a major security breach even with apps in snap/containers/whatever. http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pag...ecure-With-X11

Until they pull up wayland compositors, I'm NOT touching snap (also because I'm on debian).

[Passso]

With snappy packages I doubt you'd see duplicates anywhere. I'm pretty sure it's a container. In that sense I don't think end users would see them. They will just be stuck wondering why the hell the disk led won't stop thrashing.

You guys are getting mad for somethings with little to no impact imo :

1) libraries size are generally small
2) who uses 5 versions of the same software ?...
3) most softwares will still use systems '.so'

Now I am waiting benchmarks to prove me that I am wrong...