Gentoo Archives: gentoo-user

From: Alan McKinnon <alan.mckinnon@×××××.com>
To: gentoo-user@l.g.o
Subject: Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Gentoo is supporting officially Snap packages?
Date: Thu, 16 Jun 2016 20:11:44
Message-Id: 576307ED.2020502@gmail.com
In Reply to: Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Gentoo is supporting officially Snap packages? by Andrew Savchenko
1 On 16/06/2016 21:11, Andrew Savchenko wrote:
2 > On Thu, 16 Jun 2016 15:27:29 +0000 (UTC) James wrote:
3 >> José Maldonado <josemald89 <at> gmail.com> writes:
4 >>
5 >>
6 >>> The last days, ArsTechnica publish this new:
7 >>
8 >>>
9 >> http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/06/goodbye-apt-and-yum-ubuntus-snap-apps-are-coming-to-distros-everywhere/
10 >>>
11 >>> "Snaps now work natively on Arch, Debian, Fedora, Kubuntu, Lubuntu,
12 >>> Ubuntu GNOME, Ubuntu Kylin, Ubuntu MATE, Ubuntu Unity, and Xubuntu,"
13 >>> Canonical's announcement says. "They are currently being validated on
14 >>> CentOS, Elementary, Gentoo, Mint, OpenSUSE, OpenWrt and RHEL, and are
15 >>> easy to enable on other Linux distributions." (Ubuntu will continue to
16 >>> support deb packages, but developers can choose to package applications
17 >>> as snaps instead of or in addition to debs.)"
18 >>>
19 >>> Gentoo is supporting officially Snap packages? Why not Flatpak?
20 >>>
21 >>> Thank you very much for your responses! Bye! :)
22 >>>
23 >>
24 >> One word SECURITY? Trust but verify does come to mind.
25 >
26 > +1
27 > It looks like C:/Program Files/ for Linux to me.
28 >
29 > It is a complete bundle with all dependency libs, thus
30 > vulnerabilities can't be fixed by a regular emerge and users will
31 > need to update _each_ snap separately. If updates will be
32 > available, but likely they will not be, at least not in time.
33
34 So it's like macs then?
35
36 >
37 > I'm not talking about tremendous RAM waste (due to shared objects
38 > duplication) and disk space waste as well. Both of them can be
39 > mitigated by deduplication of RAM and disk pages, but this will eat
40 > lots of CPU and users should be quite advanced to do that.
41 >
42 >> Containers are not exactly the most secure apparatus, imho.
43 >> "Clair is an open source project for the static analysis of vulnerabilities
44 >> in appc and docker containers." [1]. So, I want to hear about the robustness
45 >> of the security on these 'self containerd packages.
46 >
47 > There is a security audit of the snap already available:
48 > http://kmkeen.com/maintainers-matter/2016-06-15-11-51-16-472.html
49 >
50 > It is quite lengthy, but worth reading.
51 > Tl;dr: if you care about security of your box, stay away of this
52 > stuff.
53
54 I don't see the part where all these latest fancy container
55 thingymagicies are not really just "embed everything in everything"
56
57 We've known for years the dangers of embedding stuff in packages (it
58 hardly ever gets updated properly)

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