RFC: Comfy - a CLI framework to bring the Ubuntu cloud feeling to snappy Ubuntu Core

Tue Jan 13 18:41:49 UTC 2015

On 01/13/2015 05:11 AM, Martin Pitt wrote:
> Hey all,
>
>> we have been asked a few times about adding one or another tool to
>> ubuntu-core to help you get your job done.
> I think this needs a more concrete definition. I take it we really
> don't want to try and build a framework for development, as that would
> need a gazillion packages, GUI, etc. For those cases it would be much
> better to make it easy to push stuff back and forth between a regular
> Ubuntu desktop and a snappy VM (or physical machine), which to me
> smells more like an sshfs or 9p thing than trying to put an entire
> development desktop into snappy.
I would suggest that the developer story should be "develop locally"
test on an actual device. Environments like Vagrant and the Cloud make
this sort of testing work flow really easy. In my playing, I found the
deployment of snap packages to be really easy. The value that I see to
the comfy package set is to make debug easier, not to do on-host
development.
>
> By the looks of your list it sounds like you aim for a comfortable
> shell environment aimed at admins? I. e. you need to be able to poke
> around and see what's wrong with your snappy packages/services, but
> you don't need to build/develop packages on it?
>
>
> Alexander Sack [2015-01-13 12:32 +0100]:
>>     + ?: accountsservice - discuss if this is useful/needed
> This is only really useful for graphical desktops, so "N" IMHO.
>
>>     + !!: apport -> prob. needs to be in ubuntu-core for crash reporting?
> For crashes in ubuntu-core itself it might be useful, but only in the
> restricted "phone" mode -- i. e. auto-submitting crashes to
> errors.u.c., not Launchpad bugs (as these need a web browser and
> interactivity).
>
>>     + Y: busybox-static
> I think this would only make sense as part of a "rescue" mode. But our
> boot never breaks, right? :-)
>
>>     + N: command-not-found - highly apt specific (asac believes); double check
> Right, it tells you which apt packages you need to install for a
> command. As you cannot do that on snappy anyway, I'd leave it out.
>
>>     + Y: cryptsetup
>>     + Y: cryptsetup-bin
> If we want to support encrypted devices, this belongs into snappy
> itself, not comfy.
>
>>     + Y: debconf-i18n
> IMHO we don't want debconf and thus this package. You can't apt on
> snappy anyway, and pretty much the only thing that would make use of
> this is "dpkg-reconfigure tzdata" for selecting a different time zone.
> But you can also do that with other CLI tools.
>
>>     + Y: dmidecode
> Rather obsolete and unnecessary IMHO.
>
>>     + Y: ed
> Urgh, how could we forget about this :-)
> (Seriously, what for?)
>
>>     + Y: eject
> This should be !! or N IMHO.
>
>>     + Y: ethtool
> Smells more like !!
>
>>     + Y: ftp
> If we really want an ftp client (I don't think we do), I'd rather have
> lftp.
>
>>     + Y: fuse
>>     + Y: ntfs-3g
> If we want to support such file systems, then these should be !!
>
>>     + Y: gdisk
> Why? Repartitioning snappy sounds rather dangerous..
>
>>     + Y: git-man
>>     + ?: groff-base - anyone opinions?
> If you want to ship manpages, I think we need that.
>
>>     + N: grub-legacy-ec2 - lets not do legacy in snappy world
> +1 :-)
>
>>     + Y: hdparm
> !!
>
>>     + !!?: ntpdate - does this work in snappy, maybe in core?
> +1 for !!
>
>>     + Y: open-vm-tools
> Do we really want to support this? ATM snappy is mostly used in QEMU,
> where you can't (or shouldn't) really start sub-VMs in.
>
>>     + Y: os-prober
> Supporting multiple OSes in a snappy instance starts to sound really
> complex and not like something which we want to support?
>
>>     + Y: patch
> N IMHO.
>
>>     + Y: perl
>>     + Y: perl-modules
> This should be D. Or !! if we want to support Perl in snappy OS.
>
>>     + ?: policykit-1
> D
>
>>     + Y: powermgmt-base
> D please. This stuff is oooooooold and crufty.
>
>>     + Y: rsyslog
> Or just enable persistant journal?
>
>>     + Y: sgml-base
> D
>
>>     + ?: ureadahead - on first glance feels unlikely needed if we dont
>> need in the core system itself
> Not necessary, doesn't work under systemd anyway.
>
>>     + ?: xauth - not clear why xauth is needed on cli comfy systems
> It would be useful to install and run an X app in snappy with X
> forwarding (e. g. ssh -X).
>
>>     + ?: xdg-user-dirs - feels not relevant for snappy world with its
>> own set of dirs; maybe snappy-user-dirs in core? :)
> +1, snappy pretty much ignores FHS and XDG dirs anyway.
>
> Martin

-- 


Ben Howard
ben.howard at canonical.com
Canonical
GPG ID 0x5406A866


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