Snap and modern software (was: Remove /snap directory)

[Jeffrey Walton]

On Tue, Dec 13, 2022 at 1:45 PM Ian Bruntlett <ian.bruntlett at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On Tue, 13 Dec 2022 at 18:14, Liam Proven <lproven at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> Since then, I have relented from this hardline position, partly after
>> listening to sometime list member Oliver Grawert's talk at the Ubuntu
>> Summit last month. I also attached a few of my laptops to my free
>> Ubuntu Pro account, which automatically, and without asking,
>> re-installed Snap and installed the livepatch tool. :-D
>
> Was Oliver's talk on snaps recorded somewhere? Tried looking for it on Google but didn't find that.
>
>> So I tolerate it, but I mostly use deb-get to install native packages,
>> and usually I have almost no snaps installed on most of my machines.
>
> Same here. For one (major) reason: it will mean an installation of an LTS Ubuntu will get to run reasonably up to date software (at least, regarding snaps). OTOH, I could be *completely* wrong with that observation :)

I've never been able to figure out what Snap is supposed to do that
Apt does not do. In my mind's eye, it's a solution looking for a
problem.

To keep software up-to-date by following major releases on Ubuntu, you
use do-release-upgrade every year. That's similar in cadence to Fedora
and dnf-system-upgrade.

When a user chooses an Ubuntu LTS or ESM release, then they are only
following point releases. They are wandering into antique software
land. It's the realm of Red Hat Enterprise Linux and CentOS, where a
stable ABI is valued over modern software.

Snap does not solve the problem of building software with up to date
components. Ubuntu's SRU [1] does not allow it. About the best you can
do is Upstream Microreleases.[2]

As a case in point, suppose I want to build and use the latest cURL
library in my C program. cURL has a number of dependencies that will
remain downlevel: zLib, Bzip2, IDN2, PCRE2, libxml2, libunistring,
ngHTTP2, OpenSSL, and OpenLDAP. Those are first order dependencies,
and they don't include the secord order dependencies, like GNU's
Gnulib, Ncurses, iConvert, Readline, etc.

[1] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/StableReleaseUpdates
[2] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/StableReleaseUpdates#New_upstream_microreleases

Jeff