Snappy RPi2 stable image #3 now available

[Ricardo Salveti de Araujo]

On Wed, Jun 17, 2015 at 2:56 PM, Niklas Wenzel
<nikwen.developer at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi Oliver,
>
> Thank you very much for your reply. Just to get that right: I didn't want to
> criticize your work in any way!
> I just think that if a post on a company's blog talks about a "very
> successful collaboration" between two companies or organizations, it implies
> that there is official support. That being said, I have to say that I'm
> pretty disappointed by the marketing department promising things which
> aren't met.

As a result of the collaboration between both sides we now have a
working snappy ubuntu core image for it, the main question remains
regarding the official support for the board.

The problem we have is that the current kernel we use for RPi2 is not
the upstream one, and maintaining a separated tree is quite a bit of
work. For the other targets we have (like beaglebone) it is a lot
easier since we can just use the upstream generic kernel that the
kernel team already maintains and publishes (the same tree you use on
your desktop), so it's just a matter of providing a build for it.

Since we're not currently doing the upstreaming work for the kernel
tree (so it could also be produced from the same generic tree we use),
and not pushing security/stable updates for it (but instead creating
builds once we get updates from https://github.com/raspberrypi/linux
from time to time), we're not saying it's officially supported. As
Ogra also said earlier, we'd also need to have all the bits and pieces
available in the archive, and then have the resulted binaries imported
by our system-image server (having it all upstream would make it a lot
easier since we'd just be consuming the packages that are already in
the archive).

As the kernel snap is not available via the official channels (because
what I described above), we can't enable updates without causing
possible issues at the image side. But, you can still use the
pre-built images and install/update the snaps that are available in
the store (and use it for snappy related development).

>> it is a community maintained image even though most maintainers work for
>> canonical in this scenario ... once all bits and pieces are in the
>> respective mainline branches i suspect we will also get officially
>> supported images on the system-image server (or in the snap store after
>> we moved snappy away from system-image one day).
>>
>> and with that said, it would actually be cool to have more community
>> people involved into maintaining this community image (hint hint) ;)
>
> Would you mind elaborating which kind of work you want us to do?
> How long do you think will it take until the Raspberry Pi 2 will be
> officially supported?

>From what I see there are 2 fronts:
1 - Helping improving and maintaining the image we currently have (by
helping fixing known issues, testing, and so on);
2 - Working to help upstreaming the remaining kernel changes for it to
work fully based on upstream (requires kernel development experience).
You can find a bit more information on that at
http://elinux.org/RPi_Upstreaming

Sorry for the confusion.

Thanks,
-- 
Ricardo Salveti de Araujo