Hacker News: seenitall

New comment by seenitall in "Statement of Canonical on RedHat's Acquisition by IBM"

seenitall — Wed, 31 Oct 2018 13:22:15 +0000

I know the data for one large cloud. There’s more Ubuntu than all the others put together, by some distance. Don’t see why it would be different on the other public clouds. They do a lot behind the scenes to make it work really well on each public cloud, which explains why people choose it.

New comment by seenitall in "IBM acquires Red Hat"

seenitall — Mon, 29 Oct 2018 05:28:07 +0000

In the end it was a tie in the Debian technical committee. The chairman’s vote was counted twice so systemd won. Then the people who had voted for systemd resigned rather than actually implement their choice.

New comment by seenitall in "IBM acquires Red Hat"

seenitall — Mon, 29 Oct 2018 02:13:40 +0000

Yup

New comment by seenitall in "Snap, Flatpak and AppImage, package formats compared"

seenitall — Mon, 15 Oct 2018 12:06:17 +0000

Evidence? I don’t think that’s the case. There are plenty of non-commercial snaps with system access, it’s really a question of the nature of the snap. You would want something like Puppet to be able to read and write files all over the system, so the snap declaration and metadata needs to say that. I think the only interaction with Canonical is that they need to review snaps which do have filesystem access to check that it makes sense and ty to spot Trojan horse apps being published that way. It’s not perfect but it’s sensible.

New comment by seenitall in "Snap, Flatpak and AppImage, package formats compared"

seenitall — Mon, 15 Oct 2018 12:00:08 +0000

The comment is mistaken. I suspect it’s being downvoted not because update control isn’t appreciated, but because it’s very much there with snaps. There are several ways to disable snap updates, and they are really quite nicely balanced for modern operations.

For example, if you publish a snap that depends on another snap, say an app which uses a database, you can set things up so the database won’t update until you publish a validation certificate that your app snap version X has been validated with database snap version Y.

Updates can be deferred by anybody, and I think there is a plan for snaps themselves to be able to defer their own updates (for example, a movie payer that is playing a movie at the scheduled update time).

Enterprise management systems can also control the flow of updates very nicely. For example, they can have a different snap revision as ‘stable’ or ‘beta’, which means they decide when a new revision of a snap will be considered for update by all the machines tracking those channels. They can also prevent any updates from happening on specific machines.

Device manufacturers also get a layer of control, similar to snap publishers with their dependencies. So an appliance that uses snaps might see specific revisions of snaps only once those have been certified on that device.

Considering how rich the actual reality of ‘software update distribution and managment’ is in practice, it’s nice to see that level of thinking built in to the system. We’ve had simplistic approaches around for decades and the results in practice are too or, there are millions of vulnerable machines out there because of neglect. I’m interested to see if these mechanisms achieve a better result all round, and the simple thing you are focused on is certainly already there.

Minimal Ubuntu – how small can it go?

seenitall — Wed, 11 Jul 2018 10:51:00 +0000

Article URL: https://blog.ubuntu.com/2018/07/09/minimal-ubuntu-released

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17505902

Points: 45

# Comments: 20

New comment by seenitall in "Ubuntu 16.04.2 LTS released"

seenitall — Sun, 19 Feb 2017 08:07:56 +0000

Ubuntu used to add a kernel to the LTS from each subsequent release, but they were separate packages. Now there will be just one HWE package that will roll until the subsequent LTS.

New comment by seenitall in "Ubuntu 16.04.2 LTS released"

seenitall — Sun, 19 Feb 2017 08:06:25 +0000

No, just doing updates gets you all the benefits of the point release, as you would expect. If you want a newer kernel, install the hwe kernel when it appears, it will roll until the next LTS and stabilise then in line with 18.04 (it is basically later release kernels built on 16.04).

New comment by seenitall in "Container orchestration: Moving from fleet to Kubernetes"

seenitall — Tue, 07 Feb 2017 23:44:52 +0000

Sensible move, though I hope it's not too disruptive for Fleet users. Don't think they have any option though. The list of easy ways to try K8s should include conjure-up on Ubuntu for either laptop-scale or large cloud/Vmware/bare metal deploys

New comment by seenitall in "Snaps are universal Linux packages"

seenitall — Fri, 03 Feb 2017 08:33:28 +0000

Snaps can now export libraries, so you can get a shared Qt framework for example if you don't want to bundle that. Up to you how much you trust the library snap publisher not to break you.

New comment by seenitall in "Snaps are universal Linux packages"

seenitall — Fri, 03 Feb 2017 08:31:20 +0000

Snaps can be 'strictly confined' which means all their reading and writing happens in a limited set of directories exclusively for their use. So 'snap remove' cleans everything up perfectly. Ask your upstream for a strictly confined snap, it's a bit more work but once they have done it everybody wins.

New comment by seenitall in "Snaps are universal Linux packages"

seenitall — Fri, 03 Feb 2017 08:26:18 +0000

Exactly. Snaps grew out of the work to make Ubuntu mobile phone apps secure and easy to update. They are a great way to publish software, worth creating regardless of all the anti-canonical trolling. And they work fine across distros except where RH has actively tried to cripple them. That's their right, but wow, toxic.