Let's kill "sideloading"

Gustavo Niemeyer gustavo.niemeyer at canonical.com
Thu Sep 1 22:15:25 UTC 2016


Hello all,

With assertions finally being put to great use, it's time to kill the term
"sideloading". That term does a disservice to our conversations, because it
is vague and also limits the thinking around what is possible.

Whenever we use "sideloading", we mean one of two things:

1. The installation of a snap from the local filesystem
2. The installation of a snap that is not backed by assertions

We can talk about these cases using this actual terminology. To talk about
the second case tersely we can use "unasserted", which is apparently a real
term [1]:

    "1. resting on a statement or claim unsupported by evidence or proof;
alleged:"

That's exactly what we mean by that.

With assertions, we can have the first case without the second, though. A
snap in the local filesystem doesn't necessarily have to be unasserted.

So:

Case 1: sideload => local snap
Case 2: sideload => unasserted snap

How does that sound?


[1] http://www.dictionary.com/browse/unasserted


gustavo @ http://niemeyer.net
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