Snappy and Dependency Tracking

[Mark Shuttleworth]

On 13/11/15 06:12, Alexander Sack wrote:
> 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.

To clarify what Asac is saying, there is a dependency mechanism in
snapcraft around "parts".

A snapcraft "part" is like a "source code package", and you can say
"build this part after you built those other parts".

There will shortly be a database of parts in the sky, what some people
call the "cloud" and the rest of us call a wiki page :)

So you'll be able to define a part of your own that depends on having
some other parts around before yours gets built, and you can specify
that just by listing those other parts in the "after" section of your
part definition. Snapcraft will go and fetch those part definitions from
the "cloud" (a.k.a. wiki page :)) and build them as if you had copied
their part definitions into your own snapcraft.

Those parts can use existing debs, or they can just be build-from-source
using the snapcraft wizardry for driving the upstream build systems.

Mark