This is the
talk page for discussing improvements to the
Snap (software) article. This is not a forum for general discussion of the article's subject. |
Article policies
|
Find sources: Google ( books · news · scholar · free images · WP refs) · FENS · JSTOR · TWL |
Archives: 1 |
![]() | This article is rated C-class on Wikipedia's
content assessment scale. It is of interest to multiple WikiProjects. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
I spent a bit of time trying to edit this to be more neutral, removing wrong or unsubstantiated elements on both "sides" and all my edits were summarily reverted by some guy who just vaguely alluded to the criticisms being "valid". One of the things I removed was, for example, a quote from a random Red Hat employee, a competitor of Ubuntu. It has no place in an encyclopedia entry, which should just be fact-based. Another thing I removed was a completely unsubstantiated or cited claim that other package managers involve more scrutiny of software (which is ludicrous, as all package managers allow publishing by developers directly, not just snap.) I'm not going to waste my time getting into some petty edit war with some misinformed zealot with some weird dog in this fight, but this is why people often don't trust Wikipedia; it's dominated by people who have the time to fight these stupid battles, so I think we need some editor to step in on this article and get it fixed. It reads like a debate transcript, not an objective article. JonBirge ( talk) 01:09, 26 January 2022 (UTC)
one of the users here ( Galgalesh/ Merlijn-sebrechts) disclosed he is affiliated with canonical and made some substantial edits to this article seemingly removing or hiding criticism of snap . the complaint about the contributor license agreement was removed, it’s inability to use third party stores was changed to calling it “currently” the only store (I see no evidence of this, a citation for a bug making this request that was closed as a “won’t fix” got removed from the article, another quote from canonical staff saying it is not worth while for them to open source the server was also removed).
another problem is that some of the content removed from the criticism section got moved to under the “functionality” section, that means that when looking at the headlines it is easy to miss that snap is criticized (I would not expect criticism to be under “functionality”). I agree that the criticism section got too big and this type of laundry list of problems does not belong in a encyclopedia but criticism should be under a “reception” section at least so a reader with a general interest in snap could jump to it to get a overview of what are the pros and cons of snap without having to read a detailed description of it’s functionality in order to discover that.
Here is the state of the article before the user made these edits.
we should assume good faith but as the wikipedia conflict of interest policy says:
"Editors with a COI are sometimes unaware of whether or how much it has influenced their editing"
So I think we should be diligent and consider if we are still maintaining NPOV. Zash 15 ( talk) 23:05, 9 March 2021 (UTC)
The criticism section is a mere irrelevant opinion of one unknown person. It's not encyclopedic at all and should be removed. 47.62.157.23 ( talk) 14:11, 24 October 2018 (UTC)
The removed material can be found here: https://en.wikipedia.org/?title=Snappy_(package_manager)&oldid=864903343#Criticism — Preceding unsigned comment added by 174.240.131.71 ( talk) 22:39, 22 January 2019 (UTC)
The screen recording application has problems due to the snap confinement. the Peek developer sentence is not as reported in wikipedia:
"Using snap is more time-consuming than Flatpak or AppImage for developers"
but he says in reddit:
"The current Snap sandboxing does not allow Peek to access any screen recording capability in current Wayland implementations. Screen recording on Wayland still is a difficult topic anyway, but there are some compositor specific solutions available. But Snap does not allow me as an app developer to punch the necessary holes into the sandbox that would allow Peek to utilize those solutions"
and
"Setting up and maintaining the Snap build system took me way more time then the related work on Flatpak or AppImage. There are still unresolved Snap packaging related issues in Peek I am not willing to spend any more time on debugging"
sentence that was then wrongly reported from OMGUbuntu in the way you can see in wikipedia. this still remain a criticism of one single developer for a single specific application with special authorization/accessibility needs ...so why was it reintroduced as a relevant opinion? why don't you talk also about Visual Studio Code statement :
“The automatic update is the biggest benefit and we like the way they run seamlessly in the background.”
or GitKraken:
"We’ve saved a lot of development time. Not only by coming to the Snapcraft Summit to accelerate our progress, but looking forward, the aim is to eliminate the need to target all the different platforms thanks to snaps’ cross platform approach"
or Plex
"The biggest appeal of Snaps is the simple installation mechanism”"
or JetBrains
"Snap packages seemed exactly what we need, and we’re happy that now our Ubuntu users can easily install an IDE from a desired channel and forget about updating the builds as the updates come in the background automatically"
or many other but only the peek criticism? -- 151.20.97.45 ( talk) 13:58, 25 May 2019 (UTC)
there is no mention that one of the main problems with snap is that its approach appears to be fundamentally incompatible with e.g. NFS-mounted home directories
— User:Markus Kuhn
"Segregation of text or other content into different regions or subsections, based solely on the apparent POV of the content itself, may result in an unencyclopedic structure, such as a back-and-forth dialogue between proponents and opponents"
"Try to achieve a more neutral text by folding debates into the narrative, rather than isolating them into sections that ignore or fight against each other."
"This article's Criticism or Controversy section may compromise the article's neutral point of view of the subject. Please integrate the section's contents into the article as a whole, or rewrite the material."
Snap gives users somewhat quicker access to new versions than the package managers like apt. That seems to be the main point of using it.
On the other hand, the server side isn't Free Software in the FSF sense; it's closed and proprietary. Also, updates are installed automatically without explicit user consent (or even user awareness) - especially annoying when updates introduce new bugs.
GNU/Linux is all about Free (non-proprietary) software, and giving the end-user more control. If these don't matter to some users, one has to wonder why they're using GNU/Linux in the first place.
These are obvious points, but probably inappropriate for the Wikipedia article because I can't find sources acceptable under Wikipedia norms. Can anyone point to a good source for them? If so, please update the Criticisms section. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Longitude2 ( talk • contribs) 22:50, 7 July 2020 (UTC)
I restructured/renamed the heading 'Universal Linux Package' as it seemed to be contradicted by its own content and the top level sections didn't mirror comparable topic pages. I struggled to reason about associated image and found the move necessary to promote it to a top level heading, left a nasty gap of text around the Snap Craft widget (the first instance of a second instance I have ever witnessed), but found pushing the 'Snap store' section down as well fixed this and may even improve the logical order.
There is a lot more that should be done, but this simple change does a lot. James Bateaux ( talk) 20:52, 28 March 2024 (UTC)
This is the
talk page for discussing improvements to the
Snap (software) article. This is not a forum for general discussion of the article's subject. |
Article policies
|
Find sources: Google ( books · news · scholar · free images · WP refs) · FENS · JSTOR · TWL |
Archives: 1 |
![]() | This article is rated C-class on Wikipedia's
content assessment scale. It is of interest to multiple WikiProjects. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
I spent a bit of time trying to edit this to be more neutral, removing wrong or unsubstantiated elements on both "sides" and all my edits were summarily reverted by some guy who just vaguely alluded to the criticisms being "valid". One of the things I removed was, for example, a quote from a random Red Hat employee, a competitor of Ubuntu. It has no place in an encyclopedia entry, which should just be fact-based. Another thing I removed was a completely unsubstantiated or cited claim that other package managers involve more scrutiny of software (which is ludicrous, as all package managers allow publishing by developers directly, not just snap.) I'm not going to waste my time getting into some petty edit war with some misinformed zealot with some weird dog in this fight, but this is why people often don't trust Wikipedia; it's dominated by people who have the time to fight these stupid battles, so I think we need some editor to step in on this article and get it fixed. It reads like a debate transcript, not an objective article. JonBirge ( talk) 01:09, 26 January 2022 (UTC)
one of the users here ( Galgalesh/ Merlijn-sebrechts) disclosed he is affiliated with canonical and made some substantial edits to this article seemingly removing or hiding criticism of snap . the complaint about the contributor license agreement was removed, it’s inability to use third party stores was changed to calling it “currently” the only store (I see no evidence of this, a citation for a bug making this request that was closed as a “won’t fix” got removed from the article, another quote from canonical staff saying it is not worth while for them to open source the server was also removed).
another problem is that some of the content removed from the criticism section got moved to under the “functionality” section, that means that when looking at the headlines it is easy to miss that snap is criticized (I would not expect criticism to be under “functionality”). I agree that the criticism section got too big and this type of laundry list of problems does not belong in a encyclopedia but criticism should be under a “reception” section at least so a reader with a general interest in snap could jump to it to get a overview of what are the pros and cons of snap without having to read a detailed description of it’s functionality in order to discover that.
Here is the state of the article before the user made these edits.
we should assume good faith but as the wikipedia conflict of interest policy says:
"Editors with a COI are sometimes unaware of whether or how much it has influenced their editing"
So I think we should be diligent and consider if we are still maintaining NPOV. Zash 15 ( talk) 23:05, 9 March 2021 (UTC)
The criticism section is a mere irrelevant opinion of one unknown person. It's not encyclopedic at all and should be removed. 47.62.157.23 ( talk) 14:11, 24 October 2018 (UTC)
The removed material can be found here: https://en.wikipedia.org/?title=Snappy_(package_manager)&oldid=864903343#Criticism — Preceding unsigned comment added by 174.240.131.71 ( talk) 22:39, 22 January 2019 (UTC)
The screen recording application has problems due to the snap confinement. the Peek developer sentence is not as reported in wikipedia:
"Using snap is more time-consuming than Flatpak or AppImage for developers"
but he says in reddit:
"The current Snap sandboxing does not allow Peek to access any screen recording capability in current Wayland implementations. Screen recording on Wayland still is a difficult topic anyway, but there are some compositor specific solutions available. But Snap does not allow me as an app developer to punch the necessary holes into the sandbox that would allow Peek to utilize those solutions"
and
"Setting up and maintaining the Snap build system took me way more time then the related work on Flatpak or AppImage. There are still unresolved Snap packaging related issues in Peek I am not willing to spend any more time on debugging"
sentence that was then wrongly reported from OMGUbuntu in the way you can see in wikipedia. this still remain a criticism of one single developer for a single specific application with special authorization/accessibility needs ...so why was it reintroduced as a relevant opinion? why don't you talk also about Visual Studio Code statement :
“The automatic update is the biggest benefit and we like the way they run seamlessly in the background.”
or GitKraken:
"We’ve saved a lot of development time. Not only by coming to the Snapcraft Summit to accelerate our progress, but looking forward, the aim is to eliminate the need to target all the different platforms thanks to snaps’ cross platform approach"
or Plex
"The biggest appeal of Snaps is the simple installation mechanism”"
or JetBrains
"Snap packages seemed exactly what we need, and we’re happy that now our Ubuntu users can easily install an IDE from a desired channel and forget about updating the builds as the updates come in the background automatically"
or many other but only the peek criticism? -- 151.20.97.45 ( talk) 13:58, 25 May 2019 (UTC)
there is no mention that one of the main problems with snap is that its approach appears to be fundamentally incompatible with e.g. NFS-mounted home directories
— User:Markus Kuhn
"Segregation of text or other content into different regions or subsections, based solely on the apparent POV of the content itself, may result in an unencyclopedic structure, such as a back-and-forth dialogue between proponents and opponents"
"Try to achieve a more neutral text by folding debates into the narrative, rather than isolating them into sections that ignore or fight against each other."
"This article's Criticism or Controversy section may compromise the article's neutral point of view of the subject. Please integrate the section's contents into the article as a whole, or rewrite the material."
Snap gives users somewhat quicker access to new versions than the package managers like apt. That seems to be the main point of using it.
On the other hand, the server side isn't Free Software in the FSF sense; it's closed and proprietary. Also, updates are installed automatically without explicit user consent (or even user awareness) - especially annoying when updates introduce new bugs.
GNU/Linux is all about Free (non-proprietary) software, and giving the end-user more control. If these don't matter to some users, one has to wonder why they're using GNU/Linux in the first place.
These are obvious points, but probably inappropriate for the Wikipedia article because I can't find sources acceptable under Wikipedia norms. Can anyone point to a good source for them? If so, please update the Criticisms section. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Longitude2 ( talk • contribs) 22:50, 7 July 2020 (UTC)
I restructured/renamed the heading 'Universal Linux Package' as it seemed to be contradicted by its own content and the top level sections didn't mirror comparable topic pages. I struggled to reason about associated image and found the move necessary to promote it to a top level heading, left a nasty gap of text around the Snap Craft widget (the first instance of a second instance I have ever witnessed), but found pushing the 'Snap store' section down as well fixed this and may even improve the logical order.
There is a lot more that should be done, but this simple change does a lot. James Bateaux ( talk) 20:52, 28 March 2024 (UTC)