Snappy and Dependency Tracking

[robert_joslyn at selinc.com]

Something I've noticed while porting some applications to Snappy is that 
I'm still very much tied to debian packages to handle resolving 
dependencies. Simple applications are easy enough to get up and running in 
a snap using source repositories and such, but as soon as an application 
has a non-trivial dependency graph, it seems the easiest path is to 
package everything as debs and use the stage-packages keyword in Snapcraft 
to pull my debs and all their dependencies. Is this the intended workflow 
for making more complex snaps?

It seems redundant to package a bunch of debs only to extract them later 
to a snap, but I don't want to deal with the dependency hell I'd get 
otherwise. If I have to package all the debs anyway, I might as well just 
put everything in a Docker container and put that in the snap. Is there 
something else I should be considering? 

Thanks,

--
Robert Joslyn
Software Engineer, R&D - Automation
Schweitzer Engineering Laboratories
509-332-1890 ext. 3214