Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Gentoo is supporting officially Snap packages?

[Mick]

On Thursday 16 Jun 2016 21:25:01 J. García wrote:
> El jue, 16-06-2016 a las 19:40 -0400, José Maldonado escribió:
> > That is possible, but the goal is to serve Snap container for
> > applications that can be downloaded and used by the user, down a
> > single
> > binary that will have all the dependencies in that binary. Docker and
> > LXC obviously can do this, but its scope and possibilities are much
> > larger and are not addressed within the scope of normal user of a PC.
> >
> >
>
> Docker doesn't get the applications down to a single binary, it's a
> package containing everything. A single binary would be something like
> what Go does by default, as it compiles every source package imported
> into the final binary, that's why even a "hello world" takes ~2MB.
>
> >
> >
> > >
> > >
> > > [AFAIK, Flatpak's for GUI apps accessed via Gnome Software so it's
> > > not
> > > quite a Snap competitor.]
> > >
> > >
>
> They say it's not a GNOME thing only, but born in the GNOME project,
> Quote from their FAQ:
>
> "Is Flatpak tied to GNOME?
>
> No. While Flatpak has been developed by people with a long involvement
> in the GNOME community it is not tied to any desktop. In fact, it was
> designed with the explicit goal of allowing it to build applications
> using any library stack or programming language an application author
> might want."
>
> I would say is the implementation of something that Lennart P. wrote in
> his blog a while back[1](I don't know to what extent is 'his' idea, or
> if it just happens that he wrote about it after discussing it with
> others), but it seems that he didn't write code for it(I looked at the
> contributors in GitHub)
>
> > Flatpak and Snap, have GUI and command-line. In addition, Flatpak
> > packages weigh less than their counterparts Snap, and right now
> > several
> > free software projects officially support it, including LibreOffice.
> >
> >
>
> The flatpak packages take less space because there's a separation
> between runtimes and applications, with the runtime(s) containing many
> of the libraries/packages required by an application, and intended to
> be used by many of these, and the application package only containing
> the remaining required libraries, or maybe only the app, so it could
> reduce but not eliminate the problem previously discussed of
> dependencies being left unmaintained and not upgraded with security
> fixes. IMHO Flatpak seems a better option than Snap, and certainly
> reducing file system and device access is a good thing about both, but
> with these advantages some other problems are created, so it's a trade-
> off.
> As Andrew Savchenko said previously Snap seems like C:\Program Files
> for Linux, but I would add 'with sandboxing' and other security
> features, and that certainly makes it better than than Windows to be
> fair.
> Maybe we will see Snaps/Flatpaks of popular proprietary software that's
> only available for Windows and MacOS right now that has no real FOSS
> competitor e.g. AutoCAD and family, I often hear the excuse of these
> vendors not supporting Linux because of the many distributions. Getting
> LibreCAD to the level of AutoCAD would take a decade or more at the
> pace it is going, right know it reminds me of AutoCAD 2004, and it
> isn't even a that level. Trying to be optimistic maybe we'll see a new
> wave of users in Linux as a result of these new packaging systems, and
> in the long run if the GNU/Linux user base grows and learns about the
> Free Software philosophy and get tired of having to pay large sums of
> money to Autodesk and other companies for a yearly permission to use
> their software, they would contribute to the FOSS alternatives with
> money to get people working full time on these, and we could see them
> grow to be real competitors.
> That said I hope upstreams don't start bundling libraries into their
> software as a result of this(at least not more than some already do
> now), that's really annoying and it could create a nightmare of the
> likes of java(I mean most java developers seemingly putting every jar
> they come across in their 'source' trees and then forget about it for
> the rest of their lifes, or at least until Oracle breaks them, after
> years and years of deprecation).
>
> [1] http://0pointer.net/blog/revisiting-how-we-put-together-linux-syste
> ms.html
>

How does Nix compare to flatpack, docker, snap, et al. from a gentoo 
perspective?

https://nixos.org/nix/about.html

-- 
Regards,
Mick