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

Android is _not_ Linux in any reasonable sense.

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't get why people consider Android to be Linux. It's nothing like traditional Linux distributions.

Sure, a customized version of the Linux kernel is used, but everything else typically associated with a Linux distribution has been thrown away. That's probably why Android is successful: the Linux kernel is marginalized to the point where almost nobody even realizes it's there, and the traditional GNU/Linux userland is thrown away and replaced with what's essentially proprietary software, even if the source code is available.

Android isn't successful because of Linux; it's successful despite using Linux. Android would be just as successful were it built around the, say, NetBSD kernel instead. It's not the kernel that makes Android useful; it's the custom userland software that Google has created that makes Android successful!

Android is as much "Linux" as Windows would be "Linux" were Microsoft to replace the Windows kernel with the Linux kernel. That is, it would not be "Linux" in any meaningful sense.

Re:SIGH.... it's like being out on a playground

[AdamWill]

Almost everybody is already pretty capable of working together. Did you know, fr'instance, that I've spent the majority of my working time for the last year working on Fedora's deployment of openQA - which is a (very nice) system written by SUSE engineers? We now regularly make commits to upstream openQA, the SUSE folks have been fantastic about working with us, and other distributions have been expressing interest in and experimenting with using openQA - and have been welcomed by both SUSE and RH/Fedora folks.

Canonical is the one player who is *always* pulling this kind of bullshit. Do you think a good way to kick off the process of playing well together with the other distributions is to issue a press release - and hold a press call - strongly giving the impression that their system is mature and ready for deployment, and that all the other distributions have already bought into it, when neither of these things is remotely true? Does that seem like a good way to engender good will and collaboration with the other distributions, to you? No. It's an attempt to strongarm the community into accepting your system by hoodwinking the press into giving it so much of a push it looks like a fait accompli. Why would any other distributor feel particularly happy about that?

Have you noticed that *not a single other distributor* pulls this kind of crap? It's always and only Canonical. We don't do it - however much someone may or may not dislike systemd for instance, we didn't build a half-assed Ubuntu package for it then issue a press release saying "Systemd Is Coming To Ubuntu", did we? SUSE don't do it. Arch don't do it. Elementary don't do it. Debian certainly don't do it. *No-one* but Canonical does it. Have you noticed how whenever this stuff happens, it always seems to involve Canonical?

When the SUSE folks built a PoC of openQA testing Fedora, they didn't issue a press release saying 'Our Awesome Test System Is Coming To All Distributions!" Nope. They contacted us in a super nice and friendly way and said hey, maybe you'd like to take this and run with it. And so we did! And now we're collaborating. *that's* how you build cross-distribution collaboration. Not by issuing bullshit press releases first and sending out ridiculous requests for people to come to your Snappy development sprint a day later, after the backlash blows up in your face. (Yes, they actually did this. The invitation goes out of its way to say that the whole team "including Mark Shuttleworth" will be there, as if we're all going to fall over ourselves like a bunch of starstruck teenagers or something. No, they didn't ask other distributions to come to some kind of neutral discussion about application bundling formats, they just asked us to come to their previously-arranged Snappy development sprint.)

Snappy is non-free anyway

[Lirodon]

Only the client portion is free software. It only works with a proprietary, Canonical-run package repository. Canonical does not offer source code for the server aspect, and thus, does not offer the ability to create third-party servers. The entire system is subject to Canonical's walled garden.