I recently discovered Sparky and Bash Shell RPG, which are two very small snaps in the store. Sparky is ~32KB and Bash Shell RPG is 8KB on disk. Compare this to the largest snaps (I have installed) Xonotic (915MB) and Android Studio (718.6MB) and we’re on a different scale of size and functionality, of course.
Somewhere in between is Mosaic, the classic web browser, which uses 2.9MB of disk space. This got me wondering what the smallest snap people could make, which was actually useful, functional and/or fun. Obviously “hello-world” can be made very small indeed, but where’s the fun in (yet) another hello-world app?
So how about a challenge, a contest if you will? Over the summer (sorry southern hemisphere!) we have a go at making some small, functional snapped applications? What can you pack into a few KB? I don’t think we should set a hard upper limit, because someone might pack amazing things in 1MB. Perhaps lets aim for 1.44MB though as a soft target?
Perhaps for this fun contest, rather than hunt down all the smallest, coolest 4k demos from the demo-scene, it would be nice if people came up with new things to snap.
Command line applications which don’t need opengl or pulseaudio will need fewer bundled libraries. Although graphical applications which don’t use desktop toolkits can also be relatively small.
I suspect there’s a small (4K or so) overhead in the squashfs header, and the need for a snap.yaml in the snap, so I don’t think you can get below that (prove me wrong?).
Oh, and snapping a 1K script which then downloads 1GB at run-time is cheating
It could be a utility, game or full blown graphical application. There’s no limit, and no theme. Just build something, put it in the store, and link it under this thread when done!
If you need help or inspiration, just ask!