From the maintainer “alreadyburnt” on reddit.
Before we begin: Snap(and AppImages) are still not official packages. This still an experimental package and just a side-project of mine.
A few years ago, I got way too interested in these semi-novel packaging systems that the various distributions came out with. I went on a rampage of experimental package creation, often without necessarily knowing the future of the packages themselves. Many versions ago, the most popular of those packages broke in a particu`larly annoying way, and I did not have time to fix it. Until a few weeks ago, that is, and now, it’s actually a lot easier for me to be sure that what I’m packaging is going to actually work because I can generate and test the packages continuously.
TL:DR the Snap, which I created, then broke, is now fixed, and it’s likely to stay that way. If you are a snap user stuck on an old version, update as soon as possible.
It is generated using jpackage combined with the Easy-Install source. As a package, it functions like the Easy-Install bundle and not like the .deb or .jar installers.
What’s the real point? Nobody really cares about Snapcraft that much, except maybe Canonical. A lot of people don’t even like them. That’s not why there’s a Snap of I2P now. The reason there’s a Snap of I2P now, and that this experiment was not discontinued outright, is because it demonstrates the power of jpackage, the technology underlying the Easy-Install Bundles for Windows, to generate self-contained images that can easily be adapted to Linux package formats. Once you can stick a jpackage inside a Snap, you can just as easily stick it inside of an AppImage. A slightly different manifest format will leave you with a working Flatpak. The same applies to docker-compose and probably many other tools. Or, you can just stick it all into a .zip file and treat it like an I2P portable installation. The files your packaging are always the same, and are simply generated by jpackageing a custom I2P router launcher.
For more information, see:
This snap/appimage/flatpak junk is an outdated, cargo cult cancer. It does the opposite of what Nix and GUIX are doing.
That is exactly the point why I dislike SNAP. People wrap something in SNAP and then stop to care about it, leaving a system riddled with old versions of software and outdated security libraries.
On top of them, I’ve never seen a bigger waste of resources on a system than SNAP. Like “BobRossQuotes” - a fortune cookie program with 1.5k of cookie texts, wrapped in an 18MB SNAP including antique SSH libraries.
Nice to see.
As a qubes user snaps make a lot of sense for non-root package installation for VM images
