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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.
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.
Until everybody learns to play well together, Linux and other great open source projects will continue to be fractious tech that people will, rightfully so, find hard to take seriously.
Maybe both sides are right, maybe neither side is... but as long as people take sides, draw those battle lines, polarize the issues to extreme levels, open source projects can never mature (indeed, maturity is a word we can not associate with such feuds). Compromise and communication seems to never be considered.
That's not to say it can't be done, but the types of personalities that stand in the forefront of Linux, for example, seem very bull-headed - obsessed that their way is right, and never willing to accept constructive criticism or the possibility that there may be a better way of doing things.
Unification is what linux desperately needs in order to make it possible for third party closed source vendors to target the platform. Otherwise they just make ubuntu binaries, and that's it.
The few times that I've ever needed or wanted to install anything that was only shipped in binary form, the packages that were put out for one or both of the popular distros (usually Ubuntu and Fedora) could easily be packaged and run on others distros (such as Gentoo and Arch which I use). Actually, by the time I wanted to install those things on my distro, somebody else had already made an ebuild or packaged it in AUR, so.... do we really "desperately" need whatever this snap apps thing is? Doubtful.
Flatpak’s (Redhat's preferred alternative to Snap) developers have been communicating with technical conference presentations and blog posts and trying to build a dialog with application developers and distributors
That explains how systemd worked, too. Systemd talked a lot with the people who write startup scripts, at both redhat and debian. They tried to be responsive to their concerns, and give them what they wanted, which is why systemD succeeded.
Just as notable is who is missing from the dialog: the actual users. Which explains why systemd made startup-script writers happy, and a bunch of users upset.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Would greater consistency between the Linux distros make it an easier platform to target with binaries? Of course! But what we've seen happen with systemd, GNOME 3, and now these "snaps" is that this unification is happening around the worst technology around.
A typical Linux distribution today consists of the Linux kernel, which is actually quite good, and everything layered on top of that is shit.
We hear about systemd causing one problem or another far too often. For example, it was just a few weeks ago that we learned that a systemd change broke software like screen and tmux!
X is a trainwreck, but Wayland is even worse. With X we get a prehistoric relic, but at least it's somewhat usable. With Wayland all we get wheel spinning pointlessly in mud, going absolutely nowhere.
Then there's GNOME 3, which is by far the worst user experience we've ever seen from a Linux desktop environment. It's a tablet-oriented UI that nobody actually uses on a tablet, yet desktop users who try to use it are forced to endure the tradeoffs made to try to cram a desktop environment onto tablets.
People were attracted to Linux in the first place because it offered software that was better than what we found in Windows or Mac OS at the time. But that was 15 years ago, and times have changed. OS X and Windows provide a much better user experience these days for desktop users. FreeBSD is now indisputably better on servers.
These efforts to unify Linux have ruined it, I think.
"Unification" is exactly what GNU/Linux *doesn't* need. Innovation creeps up in the FOSS world through other projects, NOT through iteratively improving one core. I'm not a fan, but it's undeniable that systemd didn't become popular simply by building on initscripts. Even OpenRC doesn't do that; it uses sysvinit, but the scripts are entirely its own. Iterative development is not enough to create large breakthroughs. In the systemd example I gave it's really not that large because it doesn't actually do anything new, but it's still such a large change that it wouldn't be possible if it wasn't its own project.
In the "wonderful" unified Linux world, you'd be stuck with what you're given. If upstream doesn't want your contributions, you no longer have the (realistic) option to fork. You either get it into the mainline release, or your innovation or improvement simply doesn't get used because everyone's already "agreed" on this base.
Unification destroys the concept of distributions, destroys the ability to fork and build, destroys the ability to greatly change and innovate. I may not be a fan of some of the recent changes (such as the systemd cult), but I absolutely respect the shit out of the environment that makes that change possible or even easy. Whether you're running OpenRC, systemd, sysvinit, runit, or whatever, you're still GNU/Linux at the end of the day. The ability to pick and choose your software in Linux is a feature, not a bug. If you don't want configurability or choice, go use a BSD or literally any other OS.
The main issue with "targeting" is itself. Software should depend on as general a base as possible. For example, it shouldn't be using low level dependencies with unstable APIs. Most applications (games being the biggest examples) can get by with dbus, udev, xorg/wayland, and SDL. Other libraries such as libav, libpng, and so on are rather stable if you target them correctly.
If we want to point the fingers at anyone, it's the closed sources guys modifying the libraries that they use and expecting every distro to use their modifications. In the same breath, Ubuntu is one of the worst distros to target *because* they modify the libraries so much. The rest of Linux land doesn't suffer all that much, if at all. Build your shit right and it'll work.
Trying to force GNU/Linux land to unify will destroy its software ecosystem. Hackers will move on and/or simply refuse to target the unified stack. I've heard of some developers actively putting code into their applications to exit early if it detects software that the author disagrees with. Things could get ugly fast.
Mandatory XKCD: https://xkcd.com/927/
It's the absolute truth of everything, as shown by the past DECADES of various standardization attempts.
Meanwhile, the concept of snaps is broken and WRONG. The reason is quite simple. Let's take OpenSSL for example. A lot of software uses it, links to it. In a snap-only world, if you had a dozen snaps on your computer that used OpenSSL, each and every one would have to update their packages INDEPENDENTLY. You have zero control over your computer. You cannot pre-empt, you cannot patch before the upstream does, you're at the mercy of that huge blob becoming available for each snap.
And NOTHING stops closed-source commercial software vendors from shipping their software with BUNDLED libs, and/or statically linked, right now. Except one little thing. They don't care about less than 1% of the user base. Case in point: Steam.
So there is absolutely NOTHING in snaps, no benefit whatsoever, over the existing delivery methods. You want a centralized app container for all your distros? Tarballs. You can tarball your bundled and/or statically build application if that's what you want, even today. And guess what, EVERY *nix operating system on the planet supports those.
And good luck with the isolation/containerization part, until all the distros agree which one to use. LXC, LXD, docker format, rocket format, next-container-wonder-du-jour.
Do you know how many different versions of Linux run across a thousand server environment?
Yes. Our datacenter has many thousands of boxes, and we happen to run CentOS on our machines. At any time, there are at most two different versions of Linux across our datacenter. When we roll out updates, some boxes will obviously remain on the old version while others are upgraded until they are all the same version again.
If you're struggling with heterogeneous machines, maybe you should consider making your datacenter more homogeneous.
The imbecile responsible for the abomination that is systemd, is employed by Red Hat.
Fuck you systemd and fuck you Red Hat.
Last time I checked, Lennart wasn't grown in a Red Hat lab. I don't think we have that technology yet. He was working on PulseAudio before we hired him. We gave Lennart a pay cheque; he comes up with the ideas on his own. ;)
However much you dislike PA and systemd - and feel free to dislike 'em as much as you want, it's a free world - they achieved their positions honestly. We did not build half-assed PA and systemd packages for a few other distributions then issue self-congratulatory press releases about how great they were and how PA and systemd were now the universal standard for everything.
What debacle?
Ubuntu releases snappy on their distribution, claims success around the world despite no one agreeing to it.
Redhat releases systemd and pulseaudio on their distribution, everyone around the world adopts it.
I can see which one is the debacle here. Oh and you think a couple of whining users matter? hahahahaha