Snapcraft: arch-specifc snaps on your development machine?

[Mark Shuttleworth]

On 08/09/15 13:06, Sergio Schvezov wrote:
> The battle for cross compilation with a random set of dependencies
> using deb packages and the multi arch story when depending on that
> needed package that does not support multiarch is a real pain. Most of
> the people doing phone development just gave up and bought an arm
> based chromebook or use the target device to build. We are looking
> into a nice cross compile story that isn't as fragile for something so
> free form (contrary to click chroot for the ubuntu phone which has a
> very controlled set of dependencies, and language[s]) and this is not
> the upmost priority either. 

My gut feel is it's better to have a nice easy story for "how you get a
dev environment of platform X" than "how you make it possible to compile
for platform X on platform Y". In the cloud era, it's much cheaper to
just "get an environment of the right platform" than to deal with all
the permutations and combinations on a single platform. One of our core
views on snappy is that the IOT platforms that are interesting are also
powerful enough to run a normal build environment; the old arguments for
cross-compilation just do not apply.

Also, with LP we can offer on-demand snap building for all supported
architectures, which gives both clean-room-build validation and easy
architectural diversity.

Mark