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A comment on The Future of Shipping Software on Ubuntu.

Re:The Future of Shipping Software on Ubuntu by davexunit on Friday September 25, 2015 @08:33AM (#10277749)
I don't think Canonical has even done its homework before going full-steam on Snappy. They seem to have completely ignored the Nix and Guix projects, which also offer atomic installation and rollback of software, but without many of the flaws that Snappy seems to have like application bundling (duplication of dependencies amongst packages), package namespace issues (identifying packages by name+version+developer, not a cryptographic hash identifying the precise build), duplicating packages in home directories via unprivileged package installation, and more. Pretty much anything Snappy can do, Nix and Guix do better and then some.

This blog post from a Nix hacker does a good comparison to show the issues: http://sandervanderburg.blogspot.com/2015/04/an-evaluation-a...

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Re:The Future of Shipping Software on Ubuntu by fractalb on Friday September 25, 2015 @09:43AM (#10278060)
Thanks for the link. A good writeup on Nix and Snappy. I have a doubt here. Does Nix support deb packages? Snappy is said to be built on deb package management and not a replacement. Can someone shed some light on this?
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Re:The Future of Shipping Software on Ubuntu by davexunit on Friday September 25, 2015 @09:43AM (#10278063)
Nix has its own packaging format. Debs (and other formats) are insufficient for functional package management. Packages are code in Nix and Guix.
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Re:The Future of Shipping Software on Ubuntu by dhj on Friday September 25, 2015 @10:06AM (#10278197)
Sounds like a security nightmare.
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Re:The Future of Shipping Software on Ubuntu by kryptiskt on Friday September 25, 2015 @10:13AM (#10278251)
How so? A Debian package can run arbitrary code as root on install. A Nix script can hardly be unsafer than that.
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Re:The Future of Shipping Software on Ubuntu by dhj on Friday September 25, 2015 @10:17AM (#10278268)
Ah. Good point. I expected dpkg to handle data blobs that were allowed to be moved into specific locations. I guess that would make post install configs impossible.
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Re:The Future of Shipping Software on Ubuntu by cwyers on Friday September 25, 2015 @10:00AM (#10278154)
That document seems to shed light on why Ubuntu is moving ahead with Snappy instead of Nix; Snappy was originally designed for Ubuntu Phone, where a source package manager is probably unfeasible.
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Re:The Future of Shipping Software on Ubuntu by davexunit on Friday September 25, 2015 @10:04AM (#10278179)
Sure, but they've failed to learn from the advancements made by Nix. Snappy's core design is fatally flawed.
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