Download size on refreshes

[Ads20000]

@niemeyer

@mwinter

@brendan.carroll

data usage on cellular connections. Many connected devices are on cellular plans with 100MB/mth data allocation.

I don’t see this “exception” any different than other exception for critical systems (ie example of having snaps in a car or any kind of critical machinery or [in my case] breaking the network for a few seconds to minutes because of snap updates.)

@mwinter Yeah, some of the features above are aimed at such scenarios.

@niemeyer What features, in particular, help with those on limited data connections? Snaps as compressed files, update deltas, and content snaps help a bit, but some snaps are still much bigger than their Deb/RPM equivalents. 0AD is 865MB compared to the 585MB of 0ad + 0ad-data + 0ad-data-common…one could blame their snapcrafters and say it’ll get better over time, but to bring Corebird down from being huge (now only 30MB!), @lucyllewy’s snapcraft.yaml is 684 lines long, which seems impractical for most snapcrafters? Brave is 193MB as a snap but 77.4MB as a Deb (close the download before it starts, just see the file size), Chromium is 139MB as a snap but 50MB as a Deb, LibreOffice 6.0 is 408MB as a snap but 204MB as a deb.tar.gz… People on data limits seem to be taking quite a hit because of the automatically refreshing feature of snapd?

[niemeyer]

As you point out upfront, deltas are the answer. People are not downloading the full size after the first time.

Then, the installation size is better on the snap side. For example, 0ad-data alone is 1.5GB installed, while the whole snap with all dependencies remain as 865MB on disk.

I will take that any day over a deb installation.

[Ads20000]

Thanks for the response Ah yes OK so deltas do make things much more reasonable, and refresh scheduling too (when bandwidth is an issue). Does seem to depend on the snap as to how much a delta saves though. The smaller installation size is awesome (especially given the bundled dependencies) and I completely forgot that point about snappy (when it comes to real reductions in install size, I know the theory but thought bundled dependencies may counteract that), thank you Though there are, by default, three versions of a snap stored on the system which nullifies that point somewhat (though in exchange for getting quick and easy rollbacks!), and this point isn’t terribly relevant when talking about bringing down Internet usage for updates.

[niemeyer]

Right, and you can always remove the other revisions at any point if desired. At some point we’ll also support configuring the number of redundant revisions for a given snap.

[Ads20000]

Awesome Also, will there be a GUI for refresh scheduling at some point? That could be helpful for those on limited data (since refresh scheduling allows monthly refreshing), I guess that’s up to the desktop team to figure out… Something in Software & Updates (on Ubuntu) to deal with this kind of snap updating would be good…

[niemeyer]

Moved this to a new topic to avoid derailing the other already long one.