Ubuntu Snappy To Work On Deduplication Support

While Snappy packaging on Ubuntu is only a few months old, it's generating a lot of interest and will eventually replace .deb packages on Ubuntu. One of the interesting features to be worked on going forward for Snappy is deduplication support.

Aside from the many other Snappy work items for Ubuntu while the Deb-based Ubuntu will continue to be maintained, other Snappy goals were discussed this week at the Ubuntu Online Summit for Ubuntu 15.10.

One of the interesting features talked about is deduplication support for content within Snap packages. Snaps would be automatically deduplicated of common files shared between snaps based upon their file hashes. There would be de-duplication on the file-system layer, de-duplication on snap downloads (with server support), and perhaps de-duplication of mapped libraries from the linker. Deduplication is a big work item and likely will take a while to implement fully, but it's an interesting goal nevertheless.

Other Ubuntu Snappy work items are improving the continuous integration / testing of snaps, removing of external dependencies, and cleaning up of Ubuntu Core along with adding missing parts to snaps. Over the current Debian-based Ubuntu, Snappy aims to make package management and system updatin faster, more reliable, transactional, easier rollback capabilities, and with stronger security.

More details on the next steps for Ubuntu Snappy can be found via these UOS session notes.