CrossOver Support - Community Forums

Hello,

I've been playing with snap packaging with my OpenGL application, and I think that packaging CrossOver as a Snap could be very advantageous. Snap includes every dependency needed. No more activating 32bit libraries just install the snap.

What do you think?

Regards

Let me preface this by saying it's my opinion as a developer, not some official line from CodeWeavers.

Bundling dependencies with applications has two major problems.

1. We cannot rely on a distribution to provide security updates for the libraries we use. It's up to the packager to keep them up to date.
2. Regardless of how many (or how few) dependencies we ship, there will always be some library components from the OS that we must use, such as the 32-bit OpenGL libraries (which are different depending on the driver). When we pull in some libraries from the OS and some from another source, it increases the risk that those libraries won't work together. This can happen for reasons that can't be anticipated, such as ALSA libraries needing an update to work correctly with the PulseAudio server.

Personally, I would rather use a system where libraries get binary-compatible security updates by default, without my intervention.

On the other hand, I generally agree with Snap's goal of sandboxing applications. That's a step desktops should be taking to improve security.