RFC: Comfortable Snappy (aka Comfy ;-)

[Dustin Kirkland]

On Mon, Jun 22, 2015 at 5:23 AM, Oliver Grawert <ogra at ubuntu.com> wrote:
> hi,
> Am Montag, den 22.06.2015, 17:59 +0800 schrieb YC Cheng:
>> Hi, I feel uncomfortable with sentences like
>>
>>
>> "Development isn’t done on the system anymore, instead the Snappy
>> system is a target system and you develop from your Ubuntu Desktop
>> host system"
>>
>>
>> I guess you are not rule out the possibility to do development on the
>> target. You just propose it might make more sense to do that on Host
>> system, right ?
>>
>>
>> From what we think about Phone Desktop system, we feel the phone is
>> getting more and more powerful, so that it make sense to use Phone as
>> Desktop system. If that's the case, I think it also make sense to do
>> development on the Phone / target.
>>
> dpkg and apt are currently disabled and will soon be completely gone
> from the core image (as will python and probably even bash at some
> point), you can indeed remount / to work on files in core in case you do
> any kind of implementation on that level...
>
> but i think having a snap with lxc container or chroot that ships a
> development environment to work in is the better idea here and saves
> normal developers from having to taint their system. the touch UI will
> be one or a number of snaps on top of core (or replacing core), i think
> we should offer *-dev-env,snap packages for each of these that come with
> all tools  and the source for that specific snap inside so you can
> locally build, change, debug and install it (perhaps with an easy snappy
> command)
>
> the good thing about moving this bit into the snap area is that you can
> do A - B comparisons by rolling back and forth between the two snap
> packages for debugging ...
>
> also the desktop will become snappy too in the snappy personal world.
> you could use these development snaps from there to have your changes
> installed via snappy-remote after building them (and as cherry on top
> such a snap could provide an interface to the SDK for building and
> debugging stuff)
>
> all this is slightly off-topic for the comfy discussion though which is
> more about enhancing the core image by some extra commands to make our
> lives more comfortable, i think the development environment for
> snappy-personal deserves its own discussion ...

Thanks for the tremendous amount of detail here, Loic!

I tend to agree with Ogra -- I think we'd benefit from separating the
discussion into the (a) dev-environment discussion, and the (b)
comfy-environment discussion, as I think they're distinctly different.

We absolutely do need to refine the developer environment experience,
for all or the reasons Loic mentioned, but I think these can be
cleanly addressed with or without comfy.

Comfy is concept that I feel strongly about.  Without a comfortable
experience, the first-use experience around Snappy feels a bit
shallow.  I've sat down with dozens (hundreds?) of Ubuntu faithful,
using Snappy for the first time at various events around the world.
And just about every time, 5 minutes in, there isn't much else they
can do with the system.  They try to run git to grab their code from
github.  Command not found.  They try to run wget to pull a tarball
from somewhere that they've stashed it.  Command not found.  Curl.
Tmux.  Gcc.  Strace.  Ditto.  I've actually shown multiple people how
to send/receive data using nc (netcat) on a snappy system.

Snappy is great, once the appliance has been built with apps
pre-installed on the system, and we're working with some excellent
partners to bring that vision to life!  But take a Raspberry Pi 2 with
nothing but Snappy on it, and it doesn't yet feel like the rich,
vibrant Ubuntu ecosystem that the world has come to love.

Of course we all understand why git/wget/curl/gcc won't be in the
minimal Ubuntu Core -- I certainly don't disagree with that.  But some
way of obtaining the familiar tools that makes a Snappy familiar and
usable as something more than firmware is critical for adoption.

ChromeOS is pretty cool, from this perspective.  For most users, a
Chromebook is just a web browser, and they love it for that.  But most
Chromebooks have a simple, unobtrusive way to put that machine into a
developer mode, dropping to a shell and obtaining utilities that
exercise the machine much more like a general purpose Linux OS.

So far, my less-than-ideal workaround on Snappy has been to 'sudo
docker run -it ubuntu', drop into a comfortable Ubuntu-ish root
filesystem, apt-get what I need into that environment, and use it
there inside of the Docker container.  Sometimes, I actually need
those tools outside of the Docker container and onto the host.  This
is where I've had some success copying files/binaries out of the
container.  It would be grand if that process could be backgrounded
and automated somehow...

Cheers,
Dustin