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> There's flat out wrong stuff in this post. First off snap packages don't waste a lot of disk space because they avoid duplication of shared dependencies by us
by Conan_Kudo 6y ago
> There's flat out wrong stuff in this post. First off snap packages don't waste a lot of disk space because they avoid duplication of shared dependencies by using file hashes. Snap packages that need the same dependencies won't duplicate them.
This is not true. Snaps are just squashfs images, there's nothing fancy there. No deduplication or anything. You're thinking of Flatpaks with OSTree, which does do this.
- bsdetector 6y agoSquashfs has a sorted order to files and LZ compression is stable (change a byte and everything will be the same after the dictionary window if not sooner). So it should be really easy to make very small update deltas for snaps without any kind of complicated GIT-like infrastructure at all. I've only glanced at the docs but Flatpack looks very complicated with lots of infrastructure and things that can go wrong; use Git to extract the app into a local repository with hard links to resources? It sound like typical linux centralized overcomplication. Snaps may be slow, there may be a lot of machinations going on to make it happen, but at the end of the day it's just a file. You have the file, your program runs. That's a big advantage.