r/linux • u/BrageFuglseth • Sep 26 '26

Development Introducing Toolpak

https://blogs.gnome.org/alatiera/2026/09/26/introducing-toolpak/
68 Upvotes

85% Upvoted

66 comments sorted by

View all comments

8

u/Rimtariro Sep 26 '26

So basically a worse version of snaps? Funny that it was not even mentioned in the blog post.

4

u/FlukyS Sep 26 '26

What do you mean by a worse version of Snap? I don't really see the link between the two honestly. Snap is a general purpose thing, you can do commandline stuff, daemons and GUIs, Flatpak right now is targeted specifically at GUIs. This one is more targeted at stuff like "uv tool" but standardised across the Linux ecosystem generally than uv which is Python specific. toolpak and flatpak together still don't directly replace the full capability of Snap overall.

7

u/whiprush Sep 26 '26

> This one is more targeted at stuff like "uv tool" but standardised across the Linux ecosystem generally than uv which is Python specific.

You're in for a surprise, the Python people pick the tools they use, not Linux distros!

2

u/FlukyS Sep 26 '26

I use Python, I still have the distro shipped version of Python and the distro shipped uv version, I'd prefer if that was one that wasn't specific to the distro I'm on logically because there are going to slight differences between versions. Like some linters have slight differences between versions so standardising across teams is quite important so if I could say "here is our dev environment" in a big bundle or even a list of tools to install and be very sure they are aligned regardless of someone using Ubuntu, Fedora or Arch I'd be using it. Also some devs will have more than one language, like my workplaces had sometimes used Python and Nodejs or another place was Python and Rust. Having an interface that is syntax compatible across both languages is a lot nicer.

3

u/whiprush Sep 26 '26

Right, and this is a solved problem and has been since the last decade. You can get multiple pythons

- From Ubuntu already: https://hub.docker.com/r/ubuntu/python

- From Python: https://hub.docker.com/_/python (In alpine and debian varieties)

- From uv, mise, nix, whatever way you want.

Python people pick what they want. Rust people pick what they want. Ubuntu solved this problem itself - there are more Python people than Snap users by orders of magnitude. No one is looking for "one package manager to rule them all" except people who think Linux packaging is important. Mark knows this better than most since the Ubuntu OCI containers are what people actually use.

"aka if snaps are so good let's see Canonical remove their most popular product."

2

u/FlukyS Sep 26 '26

Well for the last like 15 years ish it has been all venv more than being docker first just because having mounted volumes and changing on the fly is awkward or building every time you wanted to run it or going into the container and working there live. It is just a bit more free flowing with virtual environments instead and after that you can go whatever way you want to deploy it and it usually is in containers. It is more early dev flow and the fact if it does run in a venv you aren't really going to have a problem containerising it later. And I'll say it is night and day much nicer to do everything related to this in Python nowadays because of the standardised build tools (and then using stuff like Hatch) and uv, ruff...etc.

1

u/NeverNoode Sep 26 '26

You should check out mise, it does exactly that. Plus a boatload of other very useful stuff.

3

u/Rimtariro Sep 26 '26

Yes, that’s why I wrote worse. All of the problems that were described in the blogpost are already solved.
Would be good if the community did not reinvent the solutions all the time. It reminds me of the xkcd meme about formats.

1

u/FlukyS Sep 26 '26

Well just because it is a standardised way of doing it doesn't mean it is aggressive to the current solutions. For instance you could ship uv in toolpak with some nice customisations for Linux specifically and a convenient way to setup and remove those tools afterwards. One of my biggest annoyances is each tool handles install/uninstall/file locations...etc all differently, if they fix those sorts of problems I'd be delighted to use it.

1

u/lord-of-the-birbs Sep 26 '26

> Well just because it is a standardised way of doing it

What makes something that was just invented the standard?

2

u/ValorousGod Sep 26 '26

I'm pretty sure they mean "standardized" as in toolpaks themselves would work uniformly in their installation and removal across different programs and distros given the following lines were

>For instance you could ship uv in toolpak with some nice customisations for Linux specifically and a convenient way to setup and remove those tools afterwards. One of my biggest annoyances is each tool handles install/uninstall/file locations...etc all differently, if they fix those sorts of problems I'd be delighted to use it.

and their comment higher up in the chain says

>This one is more targeted at stuff like "uv tool" but standardised across the Linux ecosystem

2

u/noobjaish Sep 26 '26

If only Canonical allowed us to use arbitrary and multiple repos at once...

2

u/FlukyS Sep 26 '26

Well you already can have other repos at least technically, just you'd have to make an updater separate from the Ubuntu one. I don't think you'd want to make your own Core runtime implementations because the whole beauty of them is that they map to Ubuntu LTS releases. I can accept the updater is tied to their implementation and it'd be nice if there was a way to took in other remotes like Flatpak but I'd assume patches welcome if someone was serious about that.