Thinking of installing snap on Debian due to scarcity of snap packages for armhf

[Ralf Mardorf]

On Tue, 3 Jan 2017 11:14:37 +0200, Mark Shuttleworth wrote:
>Also, something to be aware of, is that snaps are built by the upstream
>or vendor, not by the distribution.

First of all, happy new year!

Now to something unpleasant.

Using snaps and allowed to ask for support by an official channel of a
distribution is bound to a distribution.

For example, http://snapcraft.io/ mentions Arch Linux. It's available
by Arch repository, but frowned upon by Arch developers, as well as the
majority of Arch users, if not by all Arch users.

If an Arch user would use snaps, there would be no mailing list
available to request help.

I suspect not many distributions will help with snaps. There were at
least two discussions on the Arch general mailing list. At least Arch
Linux doesn't support it and it's very important, that in addition
snaps are frowned upon, for a long list of very good reasons.

Btw. it would be nice to remove Arch Linux from this list at
http://snapcraft.io/ .

I will not post links. I would welcome, if Mark would ask for an opinion
at https://lists.archlinux.org//listinfo/arch-general and maybe on other
distribution's mailing lists.

The impression that upstream and vendors will provide snaps for
installation on a huge amount of distros is wrong. Perhaps a minority
of upstream developers is willing to contribute snaps for Ubuntu. Most
common is that upstream supports no packages at all, or a DEB and/or a
RPM, e.g. by installing the software to /opt without using shared
libraries.

Regards,
Ralf