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Ubuntu 16.04 LTS Will Bring Snap Packages For Up-To-Date, More Secure Apps (neowin.net)
An anonymous reader points us to a report on Neowin: Canonical, Ubuntu's parent company, has announced that Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Long Term Support) will come with support for the snap packaging format and tools. As a result, end users will get more up-to-date apps, something that proved tricky in the past due âoethe complexity of packaging and providing updates,â which prevented updates to some apps being delivered. Snaps will make the Ubuntu platform more unified, developers will more easily be able to create software for PC, Server, Mobile, or IoT devices. The other major benefit of snaps is that that they're more secure than software installed through deb packages. Snaps are isolated from the rest of the system, meaning that malware packaged with a snap won't be able to affect your Ubuntu installation.
I agree, funny thing is that application packaging can *already* bundle their own version of a library, if they cared. That's part of the whole point of the /opt/ filesystem hierarchy, to give applications their own space to apply *whatever* they want
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
The details on this new packaging system are scarce--and I've checked--but it looks like a reimplementation of Docker, which would be a welcome addition. A number of comments have stated that this would lead to library fragmentation and security problems with a large number of library 'copies' needing updates. However, if this is implemented like Docker, all the apps would depend on a core image that would be updated in itself.
Frankly, docker apps are the future of package management. Each app is sandboxed (like a chroot jail), and you can establish firewall-like access to the app for directories, services and such. Also, dependency hell goes away because these apps use the advantages of static and dynamic libraries. As long as a package is using a core image (like Ubuntu 16.04), then updates to that image are automatically upgraded to all apps.
The only puzzling aspect of this is why ubuntu didn't just use Docker. X connections are non trivial with Docker, and perhaps this new system makes access more straightforward. In any event, I think there's more than meets the eye here. Apt rocks, but docker is better for package management.
Wow, people commenting seem to have so little information about what this actually is. (Canonical is partly to blame for, as usual, doing a poor job at messaging.)
This is not replacing the Debian build system or Debian packages. Ubuntu will continue to be based on Debian.
This is an additional packaging system that makes it exceptionally easy to more reliably distribute Linux applications and services. Underneath it uses LXC (also originally developed at Canonical), the same jail-like technology that powers Docker and LXD. It basically lets the application get its own "view" of the operating system's filesystem (using AuFS) so that you can distribute required dependencies with the application. Of course it can't override the Linux kernel or other important system services, but it actually solves a major hurdle in distributing software across various OS library baselines. Until now, we've been using PPAs or other external Debian repositories to distribute software -- you can still use them if you prefer, but these are tied to the baseline and need constant tweaking to the packagers. A Snappy package made now should be able to run years from now without a problem. The Snapcraft packaging tool is very easy to use and does so much of the hard work for you: you can even just give it a git repository URL, and it will pull and build and package. I see it being very useful for something like Steam.
Also, like Docker, Snappy uses SHA-signed diffs, so package updates will be very fast. It also makes it trivial to switch between versions.
The announcement is that Ubuntu 16.04 will come with Snappy built in, so you can immediately install Snappy packages if you want. You don't have to.
There is also a new flavor of Ubuntu called "Snappy Ubuntu Core" in which the base OS itself is a Snappy image, so that it gets updates the same way as the other packages, and in the same way you can switch between versions. It is useful for various special use cases. For example, a phone OS will have an easier and safer job upgrading while letting the user trivially revert back if things break. It is not the official Ubuntu recommended for all users, but rather a building block for developers to create specialized Ubuntu-and-Snappy-based distributions.