Snap and modern software (was: Remove /snap directory)

[Robert Heller]

At Tue, 13 Dec 2022 15:30:49 -0500 noloader at gmail.com, "Ubuntu user technical support,? not for general discussions" <ubuntu-users at lists.ubuntu.com> wrote:

> 
> On Tue, Dec 13, 2022 at 1:45 PM Ian Bruntlett <ian.bruntlett at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > On Tue, 13 Dec 2022 at 18:14, Liam Proven <lproven at gmail.com> wrote:
> >>
> >> Since then, I have relented from this hardline position, partly after
> >> listening to sometime list member Oliver Grawert's talk at the Ubuntu
> >> Summit last month. I also attached a few of my laptops to my free
> >> Ubuntu Pro account, which automatically, and without asking,
> >> re-installed Snap and installed the livepatch tool. :-D
> >
> > Was Oliver's talk on snaps recorded somewhere? Tried looking for it on Google but didn't find that.
> >
> >> So I tolerate it, but I mostly use deb-get to install native packages,
> >> and usually I have almost no snaps installed on most of my machines.
> >
> > Same here. For one (major) reason: it will mean an installation of an LTS Ubuntu will get to run reasonably up to date software (at least, regarding snaps). OTOH, I could be *completely* wrong with that observation :)
> 
> I've never been able to figure out what Snap is supposed to do that
> Apt does not do. In my mind's eye, it's a solution looking for a
> problem.

I *think* what Snap is supposed to do is build software with a self-contained
"virtual" environment that might be (and generally is) "newer" (more
up-to-date) that can then run on a system with otherwise an "older" system 
environment, without having to actually update everything.  There are actually 
several hacks implementing this functionallity: "snap", "flatpack", etc.  I 
believe these hacks create an image VFS that gets "mounted" using a statically 
linked stub executable, which runs the software in this VFS (which countains 
newer versions of system libraries, etc.).


> 
> To keep software up-to-date by following major releases on Ubuntu, you
> use do-release-upgrade every year. That's similar in cadence to Fedora
> and dnf-system-upgrade.
> 
> When a user chooses an Ubuntu LTS or ESM release, then they are only
> following point releases. They are wandering into antique software
> land. It's the realm of Red Hat Enterprise Linux and CentOS, where a
> stable ABI is valued over modern software.
> 
> Snap does not solve the problem of building software with up to date
> components. Ubuntu's SRU [1] does not allow it. About the best you can
> do is Upstream Microreleases.[2]
> 
> As a case in point, suppose I want to build and use the latest cURL
> library in my C program. cURL has a number of dependencies that will
> remain downlevel: zLib, Bzip2, IDN2, PCRE2, libxml2, libunistring,
> ngHTTP2, OpenSSL, and OpenLDAP. Those are first order dependencies,
> and they don't include the secord order dependencies, like GNU's
> Gnulib, Ncurses, iConvert, Readline, etc.
> 
> [1] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/StableReleaseUpdates
> [2] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/StableReleaseUpdates#New_upstream_microreleases
> 
> Jeff
> 

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