A very important aspect of snap that should have been noted in the article is the lack of user control over the a snap's updating process; Users are not allowed to control when updates are applied, leading to a windows 10-like user experience: https://forum.snapcraft.io/t/disabling-automatic-refresh-for...
From what I could understand, placing the update process under the control of snap app developers - rather that device owners - is deliberate design decision.
A poor one at that. I don't understand why they couldn't make the Deb packages portable to a containerized format, where all the work has already been done. They'd be much better off automating the package build process instead of creating a new format for package maintainers that doesn't align with Debian.
At least Arch and Alpine has a simple and human readable PKGBUILD format that only takes 15 minutes to understand and update your own packages. They have up-to-date packages for pretty much everything, even though Debian and Ubuntu have been around longer.
I'm all for containerizing a Linux distro, and think it is a great idea, but Canonical hasn't exactly proven to be the best at this. Right before Ian Murdock passed while working at Docker, he didn't have many positive things to say about Canonical and their leadership. Most reviews on Glassdoor also talk about the poor leadership there. Therefore I see no reason to use Snap at this time.
For those that understandably won't want to go through it all, the short version is that by design snaps will force the update eventually, so that a system isn't simply left behind, but since snapd came out a few years ago we've been constantly working on multiple methods to offer control over when exactly the update takes place. These are features such as:
So, the goal is actually to offer control, but we are indeed trying to prevent systems from getting out of date for good. Maybe that's a bad idea, and if it turns out to be we can change that in the future, but we've been making an honest effort to try to fix the problems of automatic updates instead of simply giving up. Once we give up, there's no going back since the dynamics around package updates will change. We have plenty of experience around these aspects with the traditional systems.
Sorry, but unless there's an option to hold back the update until I explicitly allow it, that's not being in control. This is still my computer and I decide when to update software.
This is this being downvoted? He is exactly right.
The ability to pin at specific version is needed not just because, but for multitude of reason: the newer version breaks something, or you have only license for up to certain version (think non-subscription Jetbrains products), etc.
The inability to disable updates removes that packaging system from further consideration. It is a showstopper.
The comment is mistaken. I suspect it’s being downvoted not because update control isn’t appreciated, but because it’s very much there with snaps. There are several ways to disable snap updates, and they are really quite nicely balanced for modern operations.
For example, if you publish a snap that depends on another snap, say an app which uses a database, you can set things up so the database won’t update until you publish a validation certificate that your app snap version X has been validated with database snap version Y.
Updates can be deferred by anybody, and I think there is a plan for snaps themselves to be able to defer their own updates (for example, a movie payer that is playing a movie at the scheduled update time).
Enterprise management systems can also control the flow of updates very nicely. For example, they can have a different snap revision as ‘stable’ or ‘beta’, which means they decide when a new revision of a snap will be considered for update by all the machines tracking those channels. They can also prevent any updates from happening on specific machines.
Device manufacturers also get a layer of control, similar to snap publishers with their dependencies. So an appliance that uses snaps might see specific revisions of snaps only once those have been certified on that device.
Considering how rich the actual reality of ‘software update distribution and managment’ is in practice, it’s nice to see that level of thinking built in to the system. We’ve had simplistic approaches around for decades and the results in practice are too or, there are millions of vulnerable machines out there because of neglect. I’m interested to see if these mechanisms achieve a better result all round, and the simple thing you are focused on is certainly already there.
Tl;dr. Your computer isn't yours, and "We" know better than you, lousy user.
(That's what I took out of the shitty design decision and disgusting justification you wrote. I'll be damned if I have to defend myself against open source apps in some shitty all-in-1 format with fascists at the helm.)
Your opinion is one shared by many on HN regarding forced updates, but the parent comment has made a proper effort to answer your questions and you resort to name calling.
I am all for freedom of speech but if you write it on a brick and throw it through my windows you're going to have a hard time getting me on your side.
Comments like these alienate people from what you're trying to accomplish.
So, a decorum "argument"... Every last thing I said was true.
I'm putting the Snap maintainers in the same bin as Facebook, Microsoft, and Google. They want to idiot-ify the user experience with "We know better than you" style of rules and degrade MY ownership.
For that, yes, I will show anger. Even if this is -1'ed and buried, I'm sure one or more of the maintainers saw it.
If it makes you happy, yes, I see it. But that doesn't make things better for anyone. We've had more interesting discussions around this issue where people could actually present good arguments towards more control, and some of these conversations resulted in the development of more control features, as presented earlier in this thread.
Also, it's important to realize that it's not me or Canonical that has control over the updates, so it's not me knowing better than you. The goal of this exercise is to have good tooling that would allow updates to flow between a publisher and a user with a better overall outcome.
That means, for example, that we are putting more pressure on publishers to get it right, because they will more quickly and obviously break people if they release something broken. There are actual high profile publishers that changed their processes because of that.
We are also putting more pressure on the tooling, because we need to be able to recover gracefully when the update does fail, and that's one of the reasons why we have a more polished transition and rollback mechanism than any package manager out there.
Yes, maybe it won't work, but it's a very interesting problem and is worth solving. Then, even if we don't fully solve it, the exercise will have been worth it, because it improved all those aspects in meaningful ways.
But I hear you... you're mad at me. Point taken. :-)
Hi, I'm a poster somewhere up in the thread, not crankylinuxuser.
However, I still have an impression from seenitall's and your comment, that you are solving the wrong problem.
- dependencies - that's something the traditional package managers solve very well :)
- temporary defer updates while running: not interrupting the user is a different issue than not updating. (In my opinion, Flatpak solves this elegantly: it can tell the running application, that a new update is installed, and when it is convenient to the application, it can restart itself. Until then, both versions are available.)
- not everyone uses EMS; I'd say that no SOHO and only some SMEs do; so here you are creating a problem for power users and small businesses; notwithstanding, that your competition (Flatpak) has the stable/beta/whatever channels too, without needing EMS or other tooling;
- device manufacturers were always able to do this with traditional package management (using a metapackage that depends on specific versions);
- some of the problems above seems to stem from the insistence of snap to have a single source of truth, under a control of single entity. All the other package systems avoid some of the issues by being decentralized. For example, you can have your own apt/yum/flatpak repository and you can control, what packages get in. AFAIK, this is impossible with snap, thus needing to implement it's own solutions for a defined scenarios.
- the above scenarios are still missing the crucial component, that crankylinuxuser points out: the user's consent to update. Neither poster in this thread addressed this concern.
The issue is, that you cannot rely on vendor/someone upstream to certify the solution for you, because they may be wrong. When it is wrong, it will break your system and the vendor will not be quick enough (or even willing) to un-break your system.
My example: we are using a certain well-known ETL tool (I won't name it here, no point in shaming them), that has a bug since some version, where it drops characters in certain Unicode range. Most customers do not have a problem, only those who are unfortunate enough processing data in a language that falls into this range. The vendor has a bug report in their bug tracking system, they are claiming to work on it, and they semi-regularly do new releases - without the bug fixed.
Of course, nobody that needs that specific Unicode range can update. Nobody in this context means a handful of users worldwide, i.e. a small fraction of percentage of customers, so that means the bug fix priority is not exactly a big one.
With traditional yum, it is easy enough to solve - just exclude that specific package from updating. With your competition, Flatpak, it would be easy too: just do not update that package. At installation time, they can still install the "old" version, when needed.
Here, the vendor certification would be not enough - the application works for most users, it's just too bad when it doesn't work for you. In the absence of EMS, there would be not much what the users could do.
And that's where the issue "someone else has control over update process, not me" comes from.
> - the above scenarios are still missing the crucial component, that crankylinuxuser points out: the user's consent to update. Neither poster in this thread addressed this concern.
Indeed. Lack of control is my biggest source of anger.
I'm accustomed these days that most devices are under some sort of remote control/ownership from the "mothership". Free Software and friends have made it so we could avoid this, and retain ownership of our systems.
On Windows, reboots are a fact of life. I was in an MRI last year that took 1.5 hours. The MRI itself was a 1/2 hour, but the required mandatory update came in when I showed up.
I also know people who 3d print have used Windows, reboot cycle update, and lost their print.
Long story short, Windows, Mac, iPhones, and Androids are not our devices. We at best rent them. Ownership = control.
So when some open source group wants to centralize and force updates like this, its because they are trying to fight for ownership of my devices. Ive fought long and hard to free myself from most onerous software. And I see it now popping up in what was once a bastion of freedom.
So yeah, I'm angry. And yes, Ill do what I think is right in terms of impeding this.
Indeed, Spotify (distributed via Snap on Ubuntu at least) doesn't scale properly on HiDPI screens for example, requiring a small tweak to the shortcut[1]. I know when Spotify has updated because I'll launch it and everything will be tiny again!
From what I could understand, placing the update process under the control of snap app developers - rather that device owners - is deliberate design decision.