Another win for snaps

[Ralf Mardorf]

On Sun, 2024-09-15 at 12:36 -0400, gene heskett wrote:
> On 9/15/24 09:26, Little Girl wrote:
> > https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9HuExVD56Bo
> Some informative links from there, with differing opinions, but all 
> disguised in a hard to understand. almost auctioneer accent.

Hi,

I just went through the video via fast forward with occasional play and
then read many comments on the video.

It is unclear to me why Arch Linux was mentioned, but the comments are
based on misunderstood half-knowledge.

"The Arch build system (ABS) is a system for building and packaging
software from source code. While pacman is the specialized Arch tool for
binary package management, the Arch build system is a collection of
tools for compiling source into installable .pkg.tar.zst packages.

The Arch build system can be compared to ports for *BSD, which automates
the process of building software from source code. The system uses a
port to download, unpack, patch, compile, and install the given
software. A port is merely a small directory on the user's computer,
named after the corresponding software to be installed, that contains a
few files with the instructions for building and installing the software
from source. This makes installing software as simple as typing make or
make install clean within the port's directory.

The Arch build system is based on a similar concept. It comprises a
collection of git repositories for every package available in Arch
Linux." - https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Arch_build_system

In the comments they confuse AUR with ABS.

Btw. it's incorrect that we cannot install different versions of the
same software, we can even provide different versions of shared
libraries without snap, flatpak and Co., see
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soname . A somewhat messy way to run old
software against old shared libraries is to copy the old ones before
updating shared libraries and copy them back in parallel with the new
ones after the update, you need just to be careful with the .so links.
However, with some work you can even provide non-messy, clean solutions.

It seems no where pip "the package installer for Python"
( https://pypi.org/project/pip/ ) and "friends" are mentioned.

And btw. the inflationary major release update of important
frameworks/toolkits like Qt and GTK is a PITA. Even when not installing
snap and Co., we suffer from broken themes by having several versions of
e.g. Qt and GTK installed

In my opinion, they are trying to get a grip on this exponentially
growing chaos through exponentially growing pseudo-solutions that end up
adding to the chaos instead of bringing order/standard back into the
chaos. Neither "pip" nor "snap" or else are a relief. Going back to BSD
ports and/or a clean package management such as apt (.debs) for Ubuntu
and something like POSIX, maybe a valid LSB, which doesn't exist yet (
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_Standard_Base ) would be a step in
the right direction.

Regards,
Ralf