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While many questions answer what is Snappy Core, I've yet to see an answer of how Snappy is faster (as claimed here) than traditional package management in Ubuntu. I get that rolling back and stuff but how is it FASTER? (in terms of infrastructure) Please use layman's terms so that I can understand

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Crutchcorn
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  • In a nut shell, snappy simply downloads and "installs" into the target system. It is less robust then apt as it does not maintain a large database of available applications, perform dependency resolution, or track installed packages/files (outside of the package). apt maintains a database of available applications, installed applications, files installed on the system, security, potential package and file ocnflicts, and dependencies. – Panther Jul 09 '15 at 21:28
  • Then that doesn't make sense at to why it is faster. If there is a database, then it should be faster, no? At lease in a traditional line of thought – Crutchcorn Jul 09 '15 at 21:49
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    snappy more or less unpacks an archive, nothing more, nothing less. Apt maintains a data base of available packages (apt-get update), and when installing a package first checks the database to see if the package is available, then resolves dependencies and conflicts, then it downloads and installs the package and depenencies, and in doing so checks to see if there are previouis configuration files on the system, etc. It takes more steps, and thus more time, to use apt. The basic extracting an archive is the same. It is all the additional steps apt uses that takes additional time. – Panther Jul 09 '15 at 21:55

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A standard Ubuntu or Debian system is built out of many debian packages. This allows you to pick and choose which ones you want installed on your system, but it means when you upgrade, each one has to be upgraded individually, unpacking files, and replacing the existing ones, then running scripts to make any needed modifications to the system to ensure the upgrade goes smoothly. With snappy, it is more like an android system: you get one big system rom file that is just written to a partition on the disk, and this rom file already contains all of the packages, already installed, but with the database of what packages are installed stripped out.

Downloading and writing one big file directly to a partition on the disk is much faster than downloading many individual package files, unpacking each into the many files they contain, then running the installation scripts. In fact, when upgrading, the download part doesn't even have to download the whole file; it only needs to download the differences between the new rom and the one you already have.

psusi
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  • Brilliant comparison to Android! This helped me understand greatly the overlying architecture of Snappy MUCH better as I am familiar with Android. Again, thank you so much – Crutchcorn Jul 10 '15 at 01:06