Snapcraft Digest, Vol 3, Issue 7

[Andrew Keech]

hi Colin,

yeah, thanks a ton that's great news!
Is there somewhere specific that I can keep up with the Launchpad
developments regarding relevant snap integration features?
-Andy

On 2016-07-06 05:00 AM, snapcraft-request at lists.ubuntu.com wrote:
> Date: Tue, 5 Jul 2016 13:06:43 +0100
> From: Colin Watson <cjwatson at ubuntu.com>
> To: snapcraft at lists.ubuntu.com
> Subject: Re: Future of Launchpad and the Snap Store
> Message-ID: <20160705120642.GB30483 at riva.ucam.org>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
> 
> On Tue, Jul 05, 2016 at 01:05:09AM -0700, Andrew Keech wrote:
>> > I've been whittling away at a snap for `gimp-edge` for a while, but feel
>> > it's been overdue to bring in the maintainer of the ppa where I currently
>> > get my builds from. Having been in touch with Thorsten now, he's got some
>> > unanswered questions about the possible future relationships or integrations
>> > between Launchpad and the Snap Store. Right now he wants to start a new ppa
>> > just for delivering the snap as a separate project from the traditional
>> > gimp-edge deb.
>> > 
>> > Are there any best practice ideas that exist? Is there some kind of plan for
>> > how the Store and Launchpad might work together, or if they'd exist
>> > separately?
> The plan is definitely for them to be able to work together, and indeed
> quite a bit of this is already in place.  The elevator pitch here is
> that Launchpad handles code hosting and building, taking advantage of
> the multi-architecture build farm we already have in place, while the
> store handles publishing and distribution.
> 
> What you can do today:
> 
>  * Push a Bazaar or Git branch to Launchpad containing a snapcraft.yaml
>    file at its top level, or import such a branch hosted elsewhere into
>    Launchpad's Bazaar code hosting
>  * Create a snap package in Launchpad, starting from a Bazaar or Git
>    branch as above
>  * Manually request builds of that snap package in Launchpad
>  * Configure the snap package in Launchpad to automatically push
>    completed builds to the store
>  * Manually publish the package in the store to whatever channels you
>    want
> 
> What you'll be able to do soon (pending code review and deployment):
> 
>  * More obvious configuration for building snap packages for
>    architectures other than the defaults of amd64 and i386
>  * Configure Launchpad to automatically build a snap package any time
>    the branch containing its snapcraft.yaml changes
>  * Configure Launchpad to automatically tell the store to publish a snap
>    package to a given set of channels after pushing completed builds
> 
> What you'll be able to do later:
> 
>  * Git-to-Git code imports, which will be more robust than Git-to-Bazaar
>    and will cope with some cases that Git-to-Bazaar can't handle; this
>    will make things easier for people who e.g. want to host their code
>    primarily on GitHub
>  * Create a code import right from the "new snap package" form on
>    Launchpad
>  * Discover all of this from the store, rather than being
>    unconditionally guided through uploading packages manually
> 
> Regarding integration with PPAs, snap packages aren't contained in PPAs
> as such.  However, you can either have Launchpad build the code that
> goes into the snap package from scratch, or you can have it assemble a
> snap package based on existing .debs in the Ubuntu archive and/or a PPA,
> depending on what you put in your snapcraft.yaml; so the two approaches
> can work together if you want, and this may make sense if you already
> have good automation for doing edge builds in a PPA.
> 
> Does that help with those unanswered questions?
> 
> -- Colin Watson [cjwatson at ubuntu.com]