Comment by sandGorgon | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sandGorgon | Hacker News Reader

HEADLINE: a merger of flatpkg and snap

DESCRIPTION: a consensus on the next generation of package management. Please. We have had decades of fragmentation (not to mention duplicated innovation) around the RPM vs DEB ecosystem. Which is why it is still hard for beginners to want to use Linux - try explaining to anyone who comes from a Mac about rpm vs deb vs whatever else. Which is why they would pay for the mac rather than use Linux ("its too hard to install software").

Its not just my opinion - PackageKit (https://www.freedesktop.org/software/PackageKit/pk-intro.htm...) was invented for this reason. So you could have Gnome Software Manager that can work the same on every flavor of Linux. Its time to build this the right way.

You have an opportunity now - but again the camps are getting fragmented. We now have snap (ubuntu/deb) vs flatpkg (redhat) all over again. And pretty strongly divided camps are beginning to form around them. It seems that the new rhetoric is snap for servers and flatpkg for desktops... which absolutely doesnt make sense.

Debian is the place to make this stand - systemd was adopted from fedora despite Ubuntu making a strong push for something else. Debian made Ubuntu adopt systemd. I dont think anyone has anything but respect for that process. Debian 10 must take a stand on this.

I don't think Debian needs to choose. Debian will keep using deb/dpkg as flatpak and snap are not intended to replace a distro's main packaging. They are supplements so users can get newer packages directly from upstream developers. Note that Debian 9 already supports both flatpak [1] and snap [2]. Because of the way snaps/flatpaks are isolated from the rest of the system, they can coexist without issues.

I thought the creators of snaps/flatpaks would be upstream developers, so they themselves will vote on the package management system by using either. There is no duplication of effort here.

Myself I prefer AppImage [3], because of its simplicity and the fact that they are already supported on all Linux distributions, without installing any explicit support.

[1]: https://packages.debian.org/stretch/flatpak

[2]: https://packages.debian.org/stretch/snapd

[3]: http://appimage.org

This is exactly right. Debs, snaps, and flatpaks will happily coexist. The upstream gets to choose which works best for them while still supporting users of all distros.

Just came to add another comment on how bad it was - I just wanted to download pypy for some experiments.

http://pypy.org/download.html

>download PyPy from your release vendor (usually an outdated version): Ubuntu (PPA), Debian, Homebrew, MacPorts, Fedora, Gentoo and Arch are known to package PyPy, with various degrees of being up-to-date.

This is the world of Linux software installation.

> This is the world of Linux software installation.

Homebrew and Macports are OS X, not Linux.

> This is the world of Linux software installation.

You don't get to first choose Arch for its different packaging system and then act highly surprised that it's different and adds to the variety of package types. Sorry, no banana here.

Snapd is actually part of Debian 9 (Stretch), which means that Snap packages are also supported on Debian, as well as Ubuntu, Fedora, SUSE, CentOS, Gentoo, Yocto, Arch, etc.

Flatpak exists for one and only one reason -- because Red Hat, Inc. refuses to work with technology of any kind led by Canonical, period.

> try explaining to anyone who comes from a Mac about rpm vs deb vs whatever else. Which is why they would pay for the mac rather than use Linux ("its too hard to install software").

How does that make any sense whatsoever? You have three different systems to choose from ... and you choose one of them because the other two are different from one another?!

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