GNOME in a snap?

[Tim]

I'm curious to how well snappy packages would scale, would shipping an entire DE (particularly GNOME) be feasible? Right now we try to track the
development builds of GNOME in the PPA but that is largely alot of wasted work, particularly earlier in the cycle. Most integration bugs don't
get discovered until much  later in the cycle when users start jumping on board.

The current tool for building GNOME locally, Jhbuild while good, is a huge barrier for new contributors, it can take days for them to get the
full stack built and seems like running daily/or milestone build would be easy pulling everything from git. If we could then setup mostly
automatic builds with the core GNOME git and then if new contributor could use this snap to just build a single gnome app, that would be pretty
awesome. It would also be good for the people that just want to test the latest builds!

The documentation seems non-existent though, and although I have scanned the source still have a few questions.

- What happens with access to things like X/Wayland, systemd dbus etc? Do these need to run withing the sandbox?
- Can we have a snap with all the core libraries and then another snap with a single GNOME app that depends on that?
- Can a plugin create the parts? jhbuild has a full list of deps etc for GNOME, but its all in xml format, there are obviously to many modules
to maintain this manually within snappy yml file as well.
- What happens if a non-critical part fails to build, will it kill the entire snap build?


Thanks
   Tim