RFC: Comfortable Snappy (aka Comfy ;-)

Thu Jun 25 12:50:02 UTC 2015

Dustin, that's great feedback!

I essentially think we need to work on two fronts:
- we should make the less-than-ideal docker approach more comfortable
- we should make it easier to do host -> target development

On Wed, Jun 24, 2015 at 3:47 PM, Dustin Kirkland <kirkland at canonical.com>
wrote:

> 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
>
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