Walt Mankowski via plug on 25 May 2022 16:08:07 -0700


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Re: [PLUG] Firefox on snap

On Fri, May 20, 2022, at 11:01 AM, Walt Mankowski wrote:
This is exactly what I was worried about with having Firefox on snap on
Ubuntu 22.04:

% snap changes
ID    Status  Spawn                   Ready                   Summary
1076  Done    yesterday at 12:05 EDT  yesterday at 12:05 EDT  Auto-refresh snap "firefox"
1077  Done    yesterday at 20:45 EDT  yesterday at 20:45 EDT  Auto-refresh snap "firefox"
1078  Done    today at 03:25 EDT      today at 03:25 EDT      Auto-refresh snap "firefox"
1079  Done    today at 10:55 EDT      today at 10:56 EDT      Auto-refresh snap "firefox"

I've figured out why this is happening. First of all, I'm continuing to see updates to the firefox snap several times a day. Here's the current output:

% snap changes
ID    Status  Spawn                   Ready                   Summary
1097  Done    yesterday at 21:20 EDT  yesterday at 21:20 EDT  Auto-refresh snap "firefox"
1098  Done    today at 04:50 EDT      today at 04:50 EDT      Auto-refresh snap "firefox"
1099  Done    today at 06:50 EDT      today at 06:50 EDT      Auto-refresh snap "firefox"
1100  Done    today at 17:45 EDT      today at 17:45 EDT      Auto-refresh snap "firefox"

I was very confused by this because it seemed like the actual snap for firefox hadn't updated since Friday:

% ls -l /snap/firefox
total 0
drwxr-xr-x 7 root root 201 May 15 16:33 1351/
drwxr-xr-x 7 root root 201 May 20 06:21 1377/
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root   4 May 20 10:55 current -> 1377/

To see what's going in, let's get some more information about the firefox snap:

% snap info firefox  
name:      firefox
summary:   Mozilla Firefox web browser
publisher: Mozilla✓
store-url: https://snapcraft.io/firefox
contact:   https://support.mozilla.org/kb/file-bug-report-or-feature-request-mozilla
license:   unset
description: |
  Firefox is a powerful, extensible web browser with support for modern web application
  technologies.
commands:
  - firefox
snap-id:      3wdHCAVyZEmYsCMFDE9qt92UV8rC8Wdk
tracking:     latest/stable/ubuntu-22.04
refresh-date: 5 days ago, at 10:55 EDT
channels:
  latest/stable:    100.0.2-1    2022-05-20 (1377) 168MB -
  latest/candidate: 100.0.2-1    2022-05-20 (1377) 168MB -
  latest/beta:      101.0b9-1    2022-05-20 (1376) 170MB -
  latest/edge:      102.0a1      2022-05-25 (1397) 179MB -
  esr/stable:       91.9.1esr-1  2022-05-20 (1375) 161MB -
  esr/candidate:    91.10.0esr-1 2022-05-23 (1391) 161MB -
  esr/beta:         ↑                                    
  esr/edge:         ↑                                    
installed:          100.0.2-1               (1377) 168MB -

A snap can contain multiple releases called called "channels". Firefox has the latest/stable channel, which I'm running. It also has "latest/beta" and "latest/edge" channels, as well as channels for several older extended support releases. I'm guessing the edge channel must get updated every time someone pushes code to their repo and it passes QA.

There's a single shared count for all of the channels in a snap, which is why it's getting updated so frequently. I guess they do this so if I ever decided to switch to the latest/edge channel, it would know which version to pull.

This system reminds me a lot of subversion, which uses a single shared version number for every commit to every branch in a repository.

You can read more about snap channels at https://snapcraft.io/docs/channels

Walt
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