On Sunday, 27 September 2020 10:24:47 AM AEST Keith Bainbridge via luv-main wrote:
I'll be interested to see if Canonical have backed away from their concept that if I 'apt install chromium' I am served a snap instead. Probably shouldn't worry, but.....
As a general rule I'm not a big fan of the concept of Snaps. However for Chromium I don't really object. When Debian/Jessie had just been released the version of Kmail (my favourite MUA) in Jessie didn't work well. That shouldn't be a problem as Debian always supports the previous release. However the Google developers decided not to release patches for older versions of Chromium to fix security issues and only released new versions (backporting security fixes can be a huge amount of work if they were due to design issues in the code). That shouldn't be a problem as Debian supports backporting newer versions for security fixes. The newer versions of Chromium source in question needed a newer version of GCC than was in Wheezy, this wasn't unreasonable, the newer version gave new security features and optimisations. Backporting GCC is a really big deal. The decision was that Chromium users were out of luck, they had to upgrade to Jessie if they wanted security fixes. For my use I setup a Wheezy chroot for running Kmail and ran Jessie for everything else. It was a pain, but the result of a series of reasonable decisions by all the developers in question. Using Snap for Chromium solves that problem. I think that having Snap as a separate thing is a bad idea. It would be better if they just had packages that included all libraries. Then you could have a tool that can take a Debian package and make a new package based on it and the libraries it needs and modify the executables to get libraries from / usr/lib/$PACKAGENAME/lib or something. With such a tool you could take a package from Unstable and make a package that works on the stable version of Debian, Ubuntu, or any other Debian based distribution. Probably most long-term Debian users have encountered the situation where they need a newer version of one particular package and it's too difficult to backport so they upgrade part of the system to Unstable. Generally this works pretty well, but it does make things difficult for security updates to libraries. -- My Main Blog http://etbe.coker.com.au/ My Documents Blog http://doc.coker.com.au/