Looking to distribute a commercial package as a snap

[Michael Hall]

On 10/06/2016 11:59 AM, stelefx at gmail.com wrote:
> One of the problems I'm running into is although I'm seeing lots of
> examples of source-driven projects, I can't find a clear example of
> taking, say, a binary and its immediate custom-built dependencies and
> resources, all nicely contained in a directory with a launch script, and
> building a snap out of it.
> 

Rocket.Chat has a good example of this, they download binary tarballs of
rocket.chat server and mongodb. You can also point to a local directory
(source: ./build/) instead of a remote source if you're running in CI or
even just compiling locally.

https://github.com/RocketChat/Rocket.Chat/blob/develop/.snapcraft/stable/snapcraft.yaml


> The other thing I haven't found is any clear indication that snaps work
> at all on Centos yet. I've found several cases of people practically
> begging for help to get it working there, with their threads closed as
> "off-topic" or with no responses at all. Someone else wanted to get a
> snap working on Ubuntu 14 and was told it only works on 16, which
> doesn't instill much confidence in this new "universal linux package"
> format.
> 
> 
> On 10/6/16 10:43 AM, Jamie Strandboge wrote:   
>> On Wed, 2016-10-05 at 23:57 -0300, Gustavo Niemeyer wrote:
>>> On Wed, Oct 5, 2016 at 11:34 PM, Spencer <spencertparkin at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>> My entry into the snap world has been a tough one.  There is online
>>>> documentation, but it is not kept up-to-date.  I get the feeling that the
>>>> bar for entry is the need to be the kind of person who loves to learn
>>>> everything about a system by becoming one of its developers.  For example,
>>>> I couldn't figure out how to use the scons plugin until I dug into the
>>>> python code for it.  Is it documented somewhere?  I don't know.
>>>>
>>> I share your feeling. We're doing a suboptimal job on documentation, both
>>> for snapcraft and for snapd itself. We need fix that.
>>>
>>> Anyhow, talking with someone on this mailing list, I learned a very useful
>>>> thing: if you go down the snap road, you want to learn how to get the log
>>>> information from you
>>> app when it's installed in strict mode.  I know of no other way to diagnose
>>>> problems with your app exhibited in strict mode, but no where else.
>>>>
>>> Logs are indeed the best way at the moment. We need to introduce some
>>> further tooling to help out on the process.
>>>
>> There is a tool that can help:
>>
>> $ sudo snap install snappy-debug
>> $ sudo snap connect snappy-debug:log-observe ubuntu-core:log-observe
>> $ sudo snappy-debug.security scanlog
>> $ <exercise your snap>
>>
>> This will look at the logs and make suggestions. It has some limitations
>> currently but it's useful as is. We'll get those sorted and I plan to work with
>> Gustavo on how to improve the tool (I suspect it might include a rename as
>> well). I know this tool is documented in some places, but based on your feedback
>> it seems it too is underdocumented.
>>
>> PS - soon you'll need to use 'core:log-observe' instead of 'ubuntu-core:log-
>> observe'

 with the snap connect command.
>>
>>
>>
> 
> 
> 




Michael Hall
mhall119 at ubuntu.com