Snappy and Ubuntu Desktop

[Nick McCloud]

Snaps are all standalone and in theory, are ring fenced off from other snaps, so everything you need to get a desktop running would need to be in the one snap. It’s designed this way to prevent dependancies breaking thereby increasing reliability & confidence in deployment. So each snap includes any frameworks it wants in its bundle.

My understanding of the project is that having a full desktop environment is not a use case it is designed. If you could get a snap together that had a desktop environment in it, it would be mighty similar to an LTS release with additional controls on the update mechanism.

Nick


> On 21 Apr 2015, at 11:06, Robert Ancell <robert.ancell at canonical.com> wrote:
> 
> We're looking at how to get Ubuntu Desktop into snaps. We're
> struggling to work out how to create a framework for this. There are
> many problems where snappy doesn't seem sufficient to do this so we'll
> try and start with a simple use case of something that needs to be
> packaged - CUPS (the service that allows us to access printers).
> 
> Facts:
> 1. CUPS is required by Ubuntu Desktop.
> 2. CUPS is shared with other desktops e.g. GNOME, KDE. Is also used in
> print servers that will not have desktop frameworks installed.
> 3. CUPS has a system service, which requires a socket /var/run/cups/cups.sock.
> 4. Applications that access CUPS do so via a library (libcups).
> 5. CUPS is just one of many shared services, e.g. SAMBA, Avahi, BlueZ,
> NetworkManager, AccountsService, GVFS, iBus, Zeitgeist, etc.
> 
> What is the ideal size of framework? Do we put CUPS into its own snap?
> 
> Are applications just supposed to depend on one framework? How does
> that work if Ubuntu desktop is made up of multiple framework snaps?
> 
> If two applications require different versions of a framework, what happens?
> 
> Where do helper libraries for services live? Applications access CUPS
> through libcups - does every snap then require a copy of libcups?
> 
> --Robert and Didier
> 
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