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0 pointsbinarycrusader10y ago0 comments

Fortunately, the creators of Snappy thought of that and included an atomic/delta update system. So when you have 100 packages that need to be updated because of a common dependency you only need to download 100 binary diffs instead of 100 full-size snap packages.

That's not really a solution though, just a mitigation.

Updating a single package for security fixes or other changes instead of a 1,000 is still vastly more efficient and faster.

Unfortunately packaging appears to be a paradox of sorts: Either your app lives in an environment of shared libraries where you have no control or your app lives inside a container of some sort that bundles copies of all those libraries. You can't have both.

That's because the solution alone can't be through packaging; it requires changes at every level of the stack.

The system needs to provide robust backwards-compatibility and sane packaging.

Applications need to use interfaces responsibly, pick dependencies carefully, and use a sane build environment.

When developers attempt to solve everything with the blunt hammer of packaging, they end up with a lot of "bent nails".

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annnnd10y ago· 1 in thread

> Updating a single package for security fixes or other changes instead of a 1,000 is still vastly more efficient and faster

It would be interesting to see the statistics - how many packages in average really use the same libraries.

binarycrusaderOP10y ago

Almost everything uses libc, so that's an easy one. But after that, libraries tend to be domain specific.

For example, all C++ programs will probably be linked against libstdc++. Programs compiled with gcc have a good chance of being linked against libgcc_s.

All desktop applications are probably going to be linked against libgtk or libqt, libx11, and various other X libraries. In short, there's a significant, obvious benefit.

As I mentioned somewhere else though, if a library is only used by a single application and that library and application are built together, then yes, you might as well statically-link it unless there's some other requirement.

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