Why develop this over the GNU Guix package manager[0] or Nix[1]? I'm not able to evaluate the differences right now, so if someone could summarize, I'd appreciate it.
I don't think Canonical has even done its homework before going full-steam on Snappy. They seem to have completely ignored the Nix and Guix projects, which also offer atomic installation and rollback of software, but without many of the flaws that Snappy seems to have like application bundling (duplication of dependencies amongst packages), package namespace issues (identifying packages by name+version+developer, not a cryptographic hash identifying the precise build), duplicating packages in home directories via unprivileged package installation, and more. Pretty much anything Snappy can do, Nix and Guix do better and then some.
Thanks for the link. A good writeup on Nix and Snappy.
I have a doubt here. Does Nix support deb packages? Snappy is said to be built on deb package management and not a replacement. Can someone shed some light on this?
Ah. Good point. I expected dpkg to handle data blobs that were allowed to be moved into specific locations. I guess that would make post install configs impossible.
That document seems to shed light on why Ubuntu is moving ahead with Snappy instead of Nix; Snappy was originally designed for Ubuntu Phone, where a source package manager is probably unfeasible.
It's not just Canonical, it seems like all the major Linux companies are curiously ignoring Nix and Guix. GNOME and systemd (and I'd wager consequently Red Hat) are betting on their own poor reinvention known as xdg-app.
[0]: https://www.gnu.org/software/guix/manual/html_node/Package-M...
[1]: https://nixos.org/nix/