Terminology cleanup: snaps vs. apps

[Gustavo Niemeyer]

On Wed, Jan 6, 2016 at 3:36 PM, Ted Gould <ted at ubuntu.com> wrote:
>
> What term do you expect to use to distinguish between a command line
> utility and a graphical application?
>

These exact terms are well known and look fine to me. Command line utility
or application, and a graphical utility or application.


> I had figured that was the difference between "binary" and "app" before.
>

But that doesn't make much sense, right?  Whether one runs an IRC client
over the CLI or over a GUI shouldn't change the nature of the client being
an application or not.


> In previous presentations I found it useful to describe an "app" as a
> binary with a set of associated metadata, but I'm not sure how that aligns
> with this terminology.
>

Yes, an application in the snap world, app for short, is a runnable program
with some associated metadata. Both the app and its metadata is made
available via a snap.

Also, does this mean that services are now apps with a service lifecycle
> capability?
>

Yes, we're taking off the term service from the metadata also. It will look
something along these lines, per sprint notes:

    apps:
        somecli:
            exec: bin/somecli
        somedaemon:
            start: bin/somedaemon



gustavo @ http://niemeyer.net
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