Reading about the cons of Snap now - "auto-updates cannot be turned off" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snap_(package_manager)
Even for client software it is bad - an app quitting out from under me because it wants to update is functionally equivalent to a crashing bug - but they're offering daemons this way, which is just insane.
Who doesn't want all their containers randomly restarting because someone up the distro chain decided when your machine needed to upgrade?
The cluster will not come up because your down node is now not the same version as the other cluster nodes.
This doesn't happen, at least on account of Snap. It's copy-on-write when it comes to updates, and whatever version you have running at the time of update will happily keep on running. I've been mildly confused by this a couple times, when I would end up with two different versions of VS Code running side by side, but the bright side was that my work wasn't interrupted.
It incidentally also sidesteps all the problems that stem from libraries or configuration being updated under a running application, which can happen with Apt.
127.0.0.1 api.snapcraft.io
Containers try to mitigate this problem but like a fever they often end up making things worse.
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.
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.
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)?
Not my favorite to install software since they're usually huge (500mb is not far out of the norm), but great for things that are hard to install, as they're pretty much guaranteed to work.
I just wish there was a command line switch to stop it from wanting to install itself on my system (move the AppImage to /opt).
