Another win for snaps

[Sam Varshavchik]

gene heskett writes:

> Sam, as a user still struggling to understand AppImage's, snap's etc, where  
> can I find the definitive description of exactly what each of these  
> represents?  Something that explains and possibly compares the advantages of  
> each?
>
> ATM i have a bunch of python vpn's, and snap's all over my arm64 stuff cuz  
> I'm into 3d printing. Then on this intel machine, its AppImages that seem to  
> have proliferated. The only snap I think is firefox.
>
> Thanks for any clarifying links.

I don't have any links to share, but these things are all alternate  
variations of the same thing. A native binary has direct dependencies on  
specific shared libraries. If they don't exist the binary does not run. Also  
the application will have indirect dependencies as well. It might contain  
Perl scripts that require specific modules (debs, from what I can tell, only  
declare dependencies on shared libraries and debhelper does not encode  
dependencies on individual Perl modules).

snaps, appimage, etc, package the application together with all dependencies  
that it requires. That's the basic idea. A native firefox package will have  
dependencies on a large number of shared libraries. They're all bundled into  
the snap, appimage, etc., and the theory is that you don't need to worry  
about installing dependencies, they're all in there.

The differences between snaps, appimages, et. al., lie in secondary  
properties. They may or may not also end up running the application in  
various kinds of containers and virtualized environments. Snaps have the  
snap store. I don't remember if it's appimages, or one of the other  
alternatives that attempt to minimize the number of duplicate libraries and  
dependencies from multiple installs.

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