The Future of Shipping Software on Ubuntu | Hacker News Reader

The Future of Shipping Software on Ubuntu

daniel.holba.ch

43 pointsfractalb11 comments

Why develop this over the GNU Guix package manager[0] or Nix[1]? I'm not able to evaluate the differences right now, so if someone could summarize, I'd appreciate it.

[0]: https://www.gnu.org/software/guix/manual/html_node/Package-M...

[1]: https://nixos.org/nix/

NIH

Same as with Mir.

I don't think Canonical has even done its homework before going full-steam on Snappy. They seem to have completely ignored the Nix and Guix projects, which also offer atomic installation and rollback of software, but without many of the flaws that Snappy seems to have like application bundling (duplication of dependencies amongst packages), package namespace issues (identifying packages by name+version+developer, not a cryptographic hash identifying the precise build), duplicating packages in home directories via unprivileged package installation, and more. Pretty much anything Snappy can do, Nix and Guix do better and then some.

This blog post from a Nix hacker does a good comparison to show the issues: http://sandervanderburg.blogspot.com/2015/04/an-evaluation-a...

Thanks for the link. A good writeup on Nix and Snappy. I have a doubt here. Does Nix support deb packages? Snappy is said to be built on deb package management and not a replacement. Can someone shed some light on this?

Nix has its own packaging format. Debs (and other formats) are insufficient for functional package management. Packages are code in Nix and Guix.

Sounds like a security nightmare.

How so? A Debian package can run arbitrary code as root on install. A Nix script can hardly be unsafer than that.

Ah. Good point. I expected dpkg to handle data blobs that were allowed to be moved into specific locations. I guess that would make post install configs impossible.

That document seems to shed light on why Ubuntu is moving ahead with Snappy instead of Nix; Snappy was originally designed for Ubuntu Phone, where a source package manager is probably unfeasible.

Sure, but they've failed to learn from the advancements made by Nix. Snappy's core design is fatally flawed.

It's not just Canonical, it seems like all the major Linux companies are curiously ignoring Nix and Guix. GNOME and systemd (and I'd wager consequently Red Hat) are betting on their own poor reinvention known as xdg-app.

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