Snappy and Dependency Tracking

[Alexander Sack]

On Fri, Nov 13, 2015 at 2:20 AM,  <robert_joslyn at selinc.com> wrote:
> 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?

Yes, another option is that you use snapcraft parts to just build your
deps directly into your snap instead of going through motion of
packaging them as debs.

We have plugins for autotools and other common build systems out there
so most software should be easy to include as parts that are built
form source directly in your snapcraft project.

Let us know!

 - Alexander