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Comment by zzalpha | Hacker News Reader

Yes, you're right, the originator of the package actually has to release PPAs that work on your release.

That's a perfectly manageable issue.

But don't claim snap's are the only solution to the problem of getting up-to-date software. That's not at all true. We've been solving this problem for far longer than Ubuntu has been around, and their approach is hardly a panacea. For example, it can and will result in additional memory and on-disk bloat as a consequence of duplicated dependencies across packages until de-duplication is implemented.

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You only get a single duplicate of the library no matter how many things depend on it. That is the whole point of snaps over just statically linking.

Well, that and the sandbox features, so that they can't interfere with the rest of the system.

You only get a single duplicate of the library no matter how many things depend on it.

Huh?

If a snap includes version 1.0.0 of libxyz, and another does the same, you have two copies. If a third snap comes along and uses version 1.0.0 libxyz, you now have three.

Snaps do not automatically de-duplicate today.

That means two copies of the library living on disk and in memory at run-time.

That would be the same with any platform that does not use some kind of explicit linking/sharing of resources. Snaps have a sharing mechanism called interfaces but yes, the software author has to declare they want to use it, no magic there.

Snaps have a sharing mechanism called interfaces but yes, the software author has to declare they want to use it, no magic there.

So, they've reinvented dependencies (though, to their credit, they gave them a different name), one of the very things snaps were intended to alleviate?

Look, don't get me wrong, snaps have some interesting advantages (sandboxing being the one major selling point, IMO). But, again, they're no panacea.

Snaps are apps in a container. Why bother with docker containers to run services while you can install everything together on a single computer? Each docker replicates the same rooted again and again.

Just like docker, snaps make sense even if there is some duplication of the libraries. Other benefits outweigh the extra size.

The advantage is that there are no dependency collisions. With apt/yum I can't have multiple versions of the same library installed at the same time. Snaps fix this.

Snap has a feature called content sharing which enables a snap to connect to assets (which can be data, shared objects, anything) in another snap.

That's only true if they share a run-time/platform snap. AKA, they each have a dependency on a shared snap.

If only there was some existing solution for packaging and deploying software where you could declare dependencies between shared resources...

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