Docs for snapcraft

[Didier Roche]

Le 01/06/2016 08:30, Mark Shuttleworth a écrit :
> On 01/06/16 07:23, Didier Roche wrote:
>>
>>>> Personally I think snapcraft is amazing, but it does create an extra
>>>> layer of abstraction to push through, which may be confusing to someone
>>>> just starting out.
>>>>
>>>> Thoughts?
>>> My thoughts are biased towards trying to use snapcraft for everything
>>> but we should not block on people wanting to do whatever they want
>>> during their creative process.
>> Of course, explaining the base concept (file system and such) is
>> important, but that can happen once we have 3-4 success of the virtuous
>> loop I explained above and having the base concepts nicely shaped in
>> developer's head.
>> Then, we can introduce a bug for instance as the next step, and see how
>> to debug/inspect it. This is when the snapcraft lifecycle concept, and
>> the snap/ directory can be introduced, exploring this way the snap (and
>> not snapcraft) concepts like meta/snap.yaml, wrapper, and file system…
> 
> Right, we agree on the basics. Here's the challenge - the smartest
> people don't sit down to write a simple snap. They want to make a snap
> of the thing they care about, which is probably big and ugly inside
> because it's been around enough for someone to care about it.
> 
> So, in that environment, learning snapcraft is a big layer of
> indirection, and worse, if you hit the limits of snapcraft and have to
> start writing a plugin, you are spending time and effort on something
> you don't care about in order to get to something you DO care about.
> 
> That same person could probably MANUALLY construct a snap, as long as
> they know what the constraints are. They can manually build their code,
> they can build and copy, they can jiggle things to work.
> 
> I love snapcraft and believe we will make it perfect. But right now, I
> see a lot of people hitting its limits and being baffled as to what it
> is doing and why. Smart people saying "I give up because I can't even
> get a bash script to work in a snap". That's a problem we must face head
> on, not deny.

Fair enough, and I understand your feeling there.

I'm letting the floor opened for others to comment :)
Cheers,
Didier