Terminology cleanup: snaps vs. apps

[Ted Gould]

On Thu, 2016-01-07 at 16:35 -0200, Gustavo Niemeyer wrote:
> On Thu, Jan 7, 2016 at 1:05 AM, Ted Gould <ted at ubuntu.com> wrote:
> > This sucks: "A Unity Application is a Snap Application that has…"
> Yeah, I wouldn't write that either. I would instead say that a unity
> application ships in a snap. Unity applications, command line
> applications, graphic applications, service applications.. these are
> all applications. You can ship any of these applications inside a
> snap. Seems to feel good.
I think that sounds natural, and the YAML should look the same. Let's
as a strawman imagine that we encoded that as a key in the YAML
directly.
apps:
  mycmdline:
    command: dostuff
    type: command-line
  mydaemon:
    command: dostuff -d
    type: service
  mygui:
    command: dostuff -g
    type: gui
From this we can see what is common and what is different. Which fields
make up an "app" and where the difference is. I think that, since we
already have a scheme for expressing additional values in capabilities,
it would make more sense to use that for defining the extra settings
for things like services instead of using an explicit key like "type".
For instance:
apps:
  mydaemon:
    command: dostuff -d
    consumes: [ daemon ]
capabilities:
  daemon:
    type: service
    stop-command: dostuff -s
    stop-timeout: 5
    optional: falseBy having this type of framework in place to explicitly define which kind of app each item is, it makes it possible for people building on Snappy, and providing their own lifecycles, to also build on the terminology. I don't have a concern over specific syntax of the YAML as much as I'd like to ensure that the app is the core element and the extension of that element is done through a standard mechanism instead of magic keys.
Ted
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