Hacker News Reader

Comment by matthewbauer | Hacker News Reader

It sounds like they expect everyone to use Snap for 32-bit binaries. This might make sense for very popular apps like Steam, but is bound to break for legacy binaries that won't have any Snaps available.

What's been missing here is the rationale for removing these libraries, though. Glibc, and most other base libraries still support 32-bit intel without any problems. The cost of Ubuntu providing them seems very low here. Since they even use APT still, I suspect they could even reuse the Debian repos for i386!

View on HN

Stupid question: if they don't ship an i386 version, how would the snaps be created? Since there would no longer be a root disk it could be based on…

I'm probably missing something obvious?

They will still be shipping 18.04lts, with security updates, for years to come. This will be increasingly outdated. I'd like to hear specific examples of where that would be a problem though, besides Wine. More specifically, I don't understand what Valve is so upset about since Valve already supplies their own run time that games are recommended to use, and I hope that would apply to their photon system.

Snaps can be built from an OS version, e.g. from 18.04 which still has 32-bit and will for 5 years (from April 2018). And the snap includes all the system libraries etc.

Fwiw, 18.04 is promised security updates until 2028 instead of the normal 2023.

Only if you're paying for the extra support through Ubuntu Advantage program.

I haven't actually used that function myself, but snapcraft supposedly supports docker as a building tool... So I'd imagine you could just use Alpine as base

The cost of Ubuntu providing them seems very low here.

If that's so, then they'll get tons of volunteers willing to put in the "very low" effort, no? More seriously, I don't think that it's going to happen, and I think you'll agree that it's unlikely. This suggests that the cost is not so low after all.

They already have all the volunteers they need in the form of Debian developers and packagers. Ubuntu is 99% Debian with just some minor changes on top. The only real costs to them are for building and distributing.

On a gentoo system being able to easily see the backbones of multi-lib support i can say that it's mostly a straight forward process, sometimes exotic makefiles might need a little push, nothing much more beyond that. Also there are volunteers only for non profit organizations like debian, arch, gentoo etc. For everyone else we are just customers and we have no obligation to help and every right to criticize.

It is possible for Canonical, Valve, $random_person or even Microsoft to distribute all the 32-bit libraries and support as a snap, which can be used by both snapped or traditional applications. The libraries would just live in a different directory, and the update lifecycle would be decoupled.

The big issue here is graphics drivers -- the host OS needs to provide libGL.so, and that requires a large 32-bit userland that needs to be updated.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com