What is the best way to package going forward (deb or snap?)

[John Lenton]

Before getting to my reply I should point out two things:

* I work on snapd itself, and think it's the bees' knees and the way
forwards for getting software into its user's hands: all the
convenience of a PPA, without needing to give unconstrained root to
random people on the internet. Also, you can point people on SUSE and
Fedora to it as well.

* I have tried three times in the past ten years to become an Ubuntu
member / developer, and gave up three times in frustration after
getting nowhere for months; I'm at this point sceptical of the whole
self-selected elite thing. It certainly works to generate bureaucracy
and roadblocks to doing what you want, namely getting software into
people's hands.

On 4 June 2017 at 14:40, Joseph Smidt <josephsmidt at gmail.com> wrote:
> let me know what is the best way to get some of these free security packages
> into official Ubuntu repos.

I think snaps is what you want :-)
I think your best bet is to use snapcraft, craft a snapcraft.yaml that
works to package the tools into a *strict* snap (this might involve
working with us in snapd to add interfaces, if what the tools do isn't
already covered by existing ones) (note you can make a snap private,
if the tools in question have a license that doesn't let you
distribute binaries), and then offer that snapcraft.yaml to upstream.
They can tie this into their CI so they'd have a snap autobuilt and
pushed to edge for every commit, and have separate tracks for
different concurrent stable revisions if they have that, and get stats
about users and such.

HTH,