Fedora QA Lead Pans Canonical 'Propaganda' On Snap Apps (happyassassin.net)

Long-time Slashdot reader JImbob0i0 shares a scathing article by Red Hat's Fedora QA "community monkey"/senior QA engineer on Canonical's announcement about their application delivery mechanism "snap"... ...and how it's going to unite all distributions and kill apt and rpm! This is, to put it diplomatically, a heaping pile of steaming bullshit... The press release and the stories together give you the strong impression that this thing called Snappy is going to be the cross-distribution future of application delivery, and it's all ready for use today and lots of major distributions are buying into it... The stories have headlines like "Adios apt and yum? Ubuntu's snap apps are coming to distros everywhere" and "Snap Packages Become Universal Binary Format for All GNU/Linux Distributions"...

Now, does Snappy actually have the cross-distribution buy-in that the press release claims (but never outright states) that it has? No... The sum total of communication between Canonical and Fedora before the release of this press release was that they mailed us asking about the process of packaging snappy for Fedora, and we told them about the main packaging process and COPR. They certainly did not in any way inform Fedora that they were going to send out a press release strongly implying that Fedora, along with every other distro in the world, was now a happy traveler on the Snappy bandwagon... They just decided to send out a wildly misleading press release and actively encourage the specialist press to report that Snappy was all set to take over the world and everyone was super happy with that.

Comments

Re:News at 11

[Anonymous Coward]

Shuttleworth pulls this shit regularly. Systemd, Mir, Unity, etc.

Pretty sure systemd was pushed -- at least initially -- by Fedora/RedHat folks.

Re:News at 11

[Anonymous Coward]

Shuttleworth pulls this shit regularly. Systemd, Mir, Unity, etc.

What? Are you confusing systemd with upstart?

Did he even read Canonical's announcement?

[Anonymous Coward]

I read the article (I know, I know) and Adam's rant seems to be completely unconnected to Canonical's announcement earlier this week. He seems to be ranting about headlines he's read in _response_ to Canonical's announcement and not what the developers are actually saying.

Adam is countering claims that rpm and deb packages are dead, but Canonical doesn't seem to have any such plans. He's countering the idea snap packages have universal support, but Canonical does not apepar to be saying they have, only that they could with help from other distros.

This seems to be yet another example of Adam going bat crap crazy over something without a foot in reality. I honestly wonder why Red Hat employs him, he does far more harm to their brand than good.

Re:Did he even read Canonical's announcement?

[AdamWill]

Did you actually try reading my post? Like, the bits with direct quotes from the Canonical press release?

Here, here's an easy one. The very first sentence of the press release claims Snappy is "enabling a single binary package to work perfectly and securely on any Linux desktop, server, cloud or device". *Present* tense. The claim is that it does this right now.

This is patently and demonstrably false. The snappy packages for Fedora are built with confinement disabled, and the installation instructions tell you to disable SELinux to use snappy. Thus the whole supposed 'security' feature of snappy itself is inactive (the snaps are not confined, they have full system access), and using snappy requires to to *significantly decrease* the security of the whole system (not just the snaps you're running).

Not to mention that meaningful confinement of X11 apps is impossible, and all major distributions still use X11 by default. This is why no-one is running around telling everyone they should use Flatpak right now. I presume it's also why Canonical engineers haven't been running around telling everyone to use Snappy right now. Canonical's PR department appears to have no such qualms, however.

So. There's a nice easy one for you. But for the advanced class - Canonical PR are not a bunch of idiots. They know exactly what they're *doing* when they issue a press release with a lot of key words and phrases carefully arranged in extremely ambiguous ways. You can bet your bottom dollar they were not shocked and amazed when all these stories came out saying that Snappy was now the agreed-upon universal app distribution system and apt and rpm would be dead any minute now. (Or if they were, it was in the "I'm shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here!" sense of the word). They knew exactly what they were doing. Have you seen 'em running around issuing clarifications, fr'instance? No? Hmm, wonder why that is. It's fairly apparent from the articles that *were* published that Canonical held a press call to go with the press release; do you suppose they were carefully correcting the assumptions of journalists on said press call? Hmm? Doesn't look like it, does it?

Re:Personal post

[AdamWill]

Well. You may not see it this way, but to me there's a rather big difference. Usually when people talk about RH 'causing grief' and 'UNIX design philosophy' (sigh, if I had a nickel for every time...) they're talking systemd. Yes? Well, sure. Lennart wrote systemd, RH is fairly solidly behind it these days (though note it wasn't at first - Lennart had to sell systemd inside RH about as hard as he had to sell it anywhere else), and quite a lot of people don't like it.

Fine, it's a free world. But that's ultimately a technical argument. We didn't put systemd under an RH CLA. We didn't issue press releases prematurely declaring that it was taking over the free world. It's a freedesktop.org project, you don't have to sign your soul over to RH to use or work on it, it has plenty of non-RH contributors, and it got integrated into non-RH distros through their usual processes for feature review.

I don't usually actually have any problems with Canonical's engineers, or their projects, believe it or not. Of course there's the whole Wayland/Mir mess, but that's kind of an exception (and even there the main problem is down to management, not engineering). The stuff I don't like from Canonical invariably comes from management and/or PR, and (again purely my personal opinion) ultimately derives from Mark and his poor-man's-Steve-Jobs complex.

I don't have any particular problems with Snappy as a technology. Heck, a couple of things about it might be better than Flatpak (I don't know either system in much depth, just broad overviews and the specifics I dug into for this kerfuffle). From a purely technical viewpoint - if you ignore the publicity, and the problematic influence of snappy being under the Canonical CLA and the server end being a black box - it's perfectly possible Snappy could turn out to be the best answer to this particular question. It's certainly not a Wayland/Mir situation - Snappy and Flatpak both have fairly complex histories and predecessors, but whichever way you cut it, they've been around about as long as each other.

The issue I have is specifically with *this press release about snappy*, and more specifically with the way it vastly overstates snappy's current capabilities, and the way it strongly implies that snappy already has substantial cross-distro buy-in. Taken together - and if you look at the stories that came out of it, which Canonical PR *certainly* was not ignorant about, especially given there was a press call - this comes off as an attempt to effectively pre-empt the whole process of building consensus around a solution by giving Snappy such a strong press push that everyone just has to fall in line behind it, regardless of the fact it's not remotely *done* yet and there are other options that have already been trying to build support the right way.