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Comment by sandGorgon | Hacker News Reader

i had a quick question - do you see a convergence of Flatpak and snap at some point ? because it seems that RedHat and Fedora are beginning another divergence on static packaging.

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Actually, there's quite a bit of cross-distro compatibility around Snaps. Beyond Ubuntu, Snaps are known to work in Arch Linux, Debian, Gentoo, Fedora, openSUSE, Yocto, and OpenWRT. Snaps simply require a modern systemd and snapd daemons. With the appropriate SELinux profiles and an updated snapd, it's entirely feasible for the same docker.snap to run on both Ubuntu and Fedora (as well as others). You can learn more about Snaps and Linux distributions at snapcraft.io.

And the same thing is true for Flatpak...but are we really looking forward to another 20 years of multiple packaging formats for Linux ?

The push towards static packaging is a great time to unify. The problem is that snap is based on deb..not sure about Flatpak. So we again have a political split.

I really think this is the opportunity to unify Linux packaging - anything, I don't care..but let us please have one package format.

http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/06/here-c...

Snaps are descendant from deb, but they are now just squashfs images with some metadata

It would be great if there was a cohesive roadmap showing how Snaps fit in with Canonical's overall strategy wrt System and Application containers across Cloud and Embedded systems.

Lots of little "islets", not so much an "archipelago".

I think it's better for someone from the Canonical/Snap team to comment on that. I'll ask them to comment.

Snaps are just a package format, an alternative to .deb which puts control of updates in the hands of the upstream. They enable an upstream to deliver a set of stable releases across versions of Ubuntu and other distros. In this case, it means Docker Inc can offer 1.x, 2.x, 3.x of Docker and provide security and feature updates directly.

Thanks for answering. Flatpak is unavailable for Ubuntu official repositories (it has an unofficial ppa) while Snap is only installable on Fedora using a copr.

A new packaging format would have been great time for Linux to converge around the biggest usability+discoverability+ availability problem that the platform has. While developers need to release one binary for osx or Windows...they need to release atleast 4 for different Linux flavors.

Is there any chance that there could be convergence around the new static packaging that everyone is reinventing?

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