I'm at the Ubuntu Snappy Sprint

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I’ve taken a week off work to attend the Snappy Sprint taking place in Heidelberg, Germany. This is an internal Canonical development sprint that I have been invited to attend. I’m here representing MATE Desktop and Ubuntu MATE.

We have a voice in the road to Snaps and we’ve got representation from the outset. I’m looking forward to working with the Ubuntu engineering teams over the next week and seeing how snaps can feature in our retrospective future.

If anyone here has questions about Snaps, post them below and I’ll try and seek answers to those questions this week.

In the meantime, I’m sampling some German beer :slight_smile:️

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Hi Martin,

enjoy yourself! and if you get the time, swing by Garmisch-Partenkirchen and I’ll buy you a beer!. :beer:

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Sounds great Martin, I was wondering what snap is all about maybe when you have some time you can explain how I would be able to use Snaps with my Ubuntu mate 16.04 and what it does

Thanks so much and enjoy your beer

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Here are a couple of Videos I found on the subject.

And

Looks interesting, but just can’t get of the question: what if some Black Hat uses this for bad purposes?

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Have a great time @Wimpy and enjoy the fine bier! I wanted to try to come up with an UM specific question for snaps but seeing as the whole idea is to be platform agnostic, I’ve failed. Looking forward to hearing about whatever information you glean from the conference.

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[quote=“SantaFe, post:4, topic:7625”]Looks interesting, but just can’t get of the question: what if some Black Hat uses this for bad purposes?[/quote]At least at this point, I don’t see snaps particularly different than potential Black Hat PPAs or debs. If it really takes off look for sloppiness to follow when sandbox limitations need permission holes. Thanks for the fantastic video selections, BTW!

@Wimpy, I’m sure security will be the big topic on everyone’s mind so that’s gotta be #1. I was looking for what I think are inevitable permissions out of the sandbox for snaps. Have fun!

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Hallo @Wimpy

A meeting of like minds - and “Weizenbier”, oh be careful - otherwise you might enjoy yourself too much. :beer:

You might want to ask a native German speaker to explain the subtle difference in the two following sentences (it should be good for a laugh):
(A) Bier in Massen ist gesund.
(B) Bier in Maßen ist gesund.

Snap packages
One thing I’ve been wondering is, will the repositories carry snaps that they’ve inspected/tested and consider “safe for use”, or will the user have to hunt snaps on the internet?

The great idea of a set of “curated” software makes me think that at least Ubuntu Mate would have a set of “approved” snap packages in the repositories. Do you have any information on the basic policy regarding this point? :penguin:

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Hi @alpinejohn, or:

“Bier in eine Kiste” Vs “Bier in eine 6er Packung”!. :smiley:

@Wimpy.

I do have a question about “Snaps”, if we want a package that isn’t already in the repo, can we add it no problem and by that I mean, will ALL dependency problems be automatically solved?. :smiley:

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Hi @Wimpy
It’s cool that you’re representing Ubuntu MATE at a Canonical meeting.

I have a couple questions about Snaps:

  • Is it possible to have a Snap package interacting with the File/Directory structure of a non-snap package?
  • How will Snap packages affect the process of reporting Bugs?

As an example: take an hypothetical Snap package for the program fail2ban and how it would relate to the non-Snap package ufw:

  • It needs to interact with the directory structure of ufw (copying rules in .conf files)
  • In case of a bug one has narrowed down to either ufw or fail2ban, how would one go about identifying the culprit / filing a bug against fail2ban?

Cheers

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I have a question about its disk usage. I like keeping the root partition to a minimum and those with limited disk space may wonder:

  • Will snaps install multiple versions of dependencies and consume more disk space as a result?
  • If a snap does not specify a specific dependency version, will it bundle the latest version at that time or use the system’s installed version?
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My question: Is any news of or plans for the possibility of installing fonts with snappy for other applications to use?

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My other question: What’s the update story for snaps? I don’t think the apt (full-)upgrade command updates them, but do they show up in the Software Updater app? Hopefully we don’t need to adopt Gnome Software because I much before having a standalone software updater app that doesn’t include an app store.

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How are snaps different from what Solus is doing with package management?

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Lots of great questions, I’m still a bit sleep deprived from the sprint but will try amd address these all later.

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Here’s a post by @Wimpy on the event:

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Sounds interesting Luke, thanks for the heads up!. :smiley: