5 ms·

All containerization is just the fever to the sickness that is the futureshock from extremely fast rate of development of major libs like c++$year, glibc (no ma

All containerization is just the fever to the sickness that is the futureshock from extremely fast rate of development of major libs like c++$year, glibc (no matter what they say about having stable endpoints), and the like. You can't run a program written today on the system repo libraries from 5 years ago. Containers try to mitigate this problem but like a fever they often end up making things worse.

zentiggr 6y ago
I don't run any APT based distribution right now but I understand the issues... I think the biggest problem I see is Canonical developing what looks like a very useful tool but holding it proprietary. If Canonical provided the snap creation and hosting tools to the community I imagine it would be judged on its technical merits. As it is, I see more and more reports that Canonical is trying to gain more and more control and that's exactly what I don't like to see. Would have tried Ubuntu but they've poisoned that well. I'll have to recalculate.
- xav0989 6y ago
  As far as I can tell, snapcraft[0], the tool that allows the creation of snaps is open-source and on github. However the hosting server-side code is closed source. [0]: https://github.com/snapcore/snapcraft https://github.com/snapcore/snapcraft
drewg123 6y ago
Wouldn't it just be simpler to statically link apps then?
- enriquto 6y ago
  Indeed! All this "packaging abstraction" stuff is ridiculously silly when you can simply distribute a static binary.
solarkraft 6y ago
Do you see the fast development itself as a problem? I tend to see as the real issue that most package managers only allow one version of a package to be installed, leading to conflicts very quickly. The best known manager that does allow this is Nix, do you know of any more, maybe ways to get this working with "traditional" package managers (completely transitioning to Nix is would be quite hard, from my limited experience)?
- remexre 6y ago
  For many packages, gentoo's portage handles this with slots
account42 6y ago
> glibc (no matter what they say about having stable endpoints) glibc does have a stable ABI. What they don't have is a frozen ABI so they will all new entry points. But old programs linked against glibc do and will continue to work fine. > You can't run a program written today on the system repo libraries from 5 years ago. You can absolutely write programs today targeting 5 year old ABIs. I agree that the FOSS toolchains could be more helpful there so you can just pass some compiler flag for the oldest glibc version you want to support but it is not impossible to achieve that on your own.

zentiggr 6y ago

I don't run any APT based distribution right now but I understand the issues... I think the biggest problem I see is Canonical developing what looks like a very useful tool but holding it proprietary. If Canonical provided the snap creation and hosting tools to the community I imagine it would be judged on its technical merits. As it is, I see more and more reports that Canonical is trying to gain more and more control and that's exactly what I don't like to see. Would have tried Ubuntu but they've poisoned that well. I'll have to recalculate.

xav0989 6y ago
As far as I can tell, snapcraft[0], the tool that allows the creation of snaps is open-source and on github. However the hosting server-side code is closed source. [0]: https://github.com/snapcore/snapcraft https://github.com/snapcore/snapcraft

drewg123 6y ago

Wouldn't it just be simpler to statically link apps then?

enriquto 6y ago
Indeed! All this "packaging abstraction" stuff is ridiculously silly when you can simply distribute a static binary.

solarkraft 6y ago

Do you see the fast development itself as a problem? I tend to see as the real issue that most package managers only allow one version of a package to be installed, leading to conflicts very quickly. The best known manager that does allow this is Nix, do you know of any more, maybe ways to get this working with "traditional" package managers (completely transitioning to Nix is would be quite hard, from my limited experience)?

remexre 6y ago
For many packages, gentoo's portage handles this with slots

account42 6y ago

> glibc (no matter what they say about having stable endpoints) glibc does have a stable ABI. What they don't have is a frozen ABI so they will all new entry points. But old programs linked against glibc do and will continue to work fine. > You can't run a program written today on the system repo libraries from 5 years ago. You can absolutely write programs today targeting 5 year old ABIs. I agree that the FOSS toolchains could be more helpful there so you can just pass some compiler flag for the oldest glibc version you want to support but it is not impossible to achieve that on your own.