elopio

Yay!!! So much work on this release by so many people. It will be great now to see it out in the wild.

If you want to know more details, you can watch the video from ETHBuenosAires: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17241136

It's a new package manager that implements existing linux security mechanisms. It will use apparmor to confine the snap to the directories that it is allowed to read and write. By default, $HOME/snap/snap-name/

Then the snap can use interfaces to go out of its confinement and access things that the user has agreed to allow: https://github.com/snapcore/snapd/wiki/Interfaces

Here's the status of support everywhere: https://github.com/snapcore/snapd/wiki/Distributions

I'm not James, but I have opinions! :D

A docker image runs a full operating system. There are some light OSs for docker, but that's still heavier than a snap.

The snap runs directly on your host, with a different kind of isolation to make it secure. So it also makes easy other kinds of communication between apps, like unix sockets or dbus.

Then there's the great feature of autoupdates. If the openstack developers push a new version, it will reach all the users within 4 hours. On a docker container you can have the same problems you have in classic distros. You'll get an old version by default, and you have to apply hacks or accept other risks if you want to get a newer.

What would be awesome is to be able to run snaps inside docker containers. That will be a mix of both worlds, docker for replication and adding or removing new machines as the load changes; snaps for getting the software into those machines. We can currently do that with linux containers, maybe at some point docker will support them too.

And we have snaps for docker and lxd, make sure to give them a try:

$ sudo snap install docker $ sudo snap install lxd

Rejoice. The same snap will work in trusty, xenial, yakkety and zesty. You don't have to do anything, and the developer doesn't have to do anything either.

Here's the docker question in askubuntu.com: https://askubuntu.com/questions/808524/whats-the-main-differ...

PPAs were good for some things, but they require you to package the software as a deb, which is a lot more work than to make a snap. And during the installation of a deb coming from a PPA, the user is at risk because it is being installed with root permissions. snaps are much more secure, during installation they are just unpacked into their confined space.