• woelkchen@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    But why is it an issue that Canonical controls a source of software for their own OS? Isn’t that the same with every distro’s repository?

    No. You can add any other repository to apt, rpm, Flatpak, etc. You cannot do the same with Snap and that’s by design. Canonical wants to be the sole gatekeeper of Linux software, hoping that all developers have no alternative but to publish software on the Snap store (ideally only there) which works best on Ubuntu.

    Therefore: Fuck Snap.

    • makingStuffForFun@lemmy.ml
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      1 year ago

      Exactly. I feel they want to sell it to a big player, but no big player will touch it unless they can fully control it. Hence snap as part of that plan. Ubuntu is a hell no for me.

    • KISSmyOS@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      You cannot do the same with Snap and that’s by design. Canonical wants to be the sole gatekeeper of Linux software

      Then why did they publish source code and documentation for all parts of it, so you can create your own snap store?

        • Patch@feddit.ukOP
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          1 year ago

          You can; the issue is that you can’t add two snap repositories at once.

          This is functionally pretty much the same thing, as nobody is likely to want to use snap while locking themselves out of the main snap repository, but it’s still important to make the distinction.

          In theory I guess there’s nothing stopping you setting up a mirror of the main snap repo with automatic package scraping, but nobody’s really bothered exploring it seeing as no distro other than Ubuntu has taken any interest in running snap.

          • woelkchen@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            I know that it’s possible to change the one entry but adding additional ones is not possible and that’s by design.

              • Patch@feddit.ukOP
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                1 year ago

                It’s all open source so there’s no reason you couldn’t fork it and add that functionality. Although it’d probably be a fairly involved piece of work; it wouldn’t be a simple one-line change.

                • woelkchen@lemmy.world
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                  1 year ago

                  It’s not all open source. Canonical merely made available a super simple reference implementation of the Snap server but the actual Snap Store is proprietary.

                  • Patch@feddit.ukOP
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                    1 year ago

                    I was referring to snapd, which is the thing that actually has the hard limit on a single repository. That’s fully open source (and there’s one major fork of it out in the wild, in the form of Ubuntu Touch’s click). The tooling for creating snap packages is also all open source.

                    The APIs which snapd uses to interact with its repo are also open source. While there’s no turnkey Snap Store code for cloning the existing website, it’s pretty trivial to slap those APIs on a bog standard file server if you just want to host a repo.

                    Not open-sourcing the website code is a dick move, but there’s nothing about the current set up that would act as an obstacle for anyone wanting to fork snap if that’s what they wanted to do. It’s just with flatpak existing, there’s not a lot of point in doing so right now.

      • flashgnash@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        From reading this that’s not the whole story. Someone working at canonical successfully made a version of snap that could use alternative stores, but the default version does not allow it

        And honestly at the point of installing that modified version you may as well just install a different package manager anyway