Monday! I am slightly jet-lagged, just like this post. Interesting things happened but I had no time to collect my thoughts and share them.
The interface re-mapping branch got another round of reviews and slight tweaks. The configuration code (think “snap get, snap set”) is now enrolled in the same mechanism and can map “system” in the API to “core” in the on-disk state.
There are some small tweaks elsewhere, additional unit tests, updates to stale comments, the usual stuff that gets addressed as a branch evolves.
This is a draft of a new blog post that doubles as a twitter log. The idea is simple. Tweet a thread a day. Post it as a blog item for prosperity^Hvanity.
So let’s rewind to Friday the 13th of July. It’s the last day of the week and I promised myself to end the week with a good outlook on core18 interface support.
The general idea is that as we move away from the core snap providing slots like network or home we need to hold them somewhere else.
What happens for your app when the core is refreshed
The core snap is universally installed on every machine that runs any snap applications. That snap provides the root filesystem which is used as a base of the execution environment of all snap application processes. Most snaps use the core as the base though technically we can now offer other base snaps, as ubuntu 18.04 approaches this will be more and more visible but for now we will just ignore that aspect.
The fine art of herding spherical mount namespaces in vacuum
This post is somewhat technical but may help application developers to peek under the hood of snapd and see the system in a more complete way. Hopefully it will be of use to more than my closest friends and colleagues.
Snap execution environment, 2.0 It’s not really 2.0, but it sounds nice to say that since many people discussed the existing environment in various formats and with varying degrees of correctness and depth.
See how the core snap is released when it's time to do so
Core snap release mechanics The core snap release is still partially manual. Ideally we’d have some tools but this is also too precious to do with awk/sed and not yet directly supported by snapcraft (the all-architectures aspect). As such we still do it by hand. Due to exceptional circumstances I will now release 2.30 core snap for you.
First of all you need snapcraft and you need to be authenticated.
When the snappy store first came to be it was initially populated by a small group of people working on the very first snaps. It was like a small family and everyone knew each other. The wild-west feeling remained for many months as you could pop in an internal or public IRC channel and ask one of the store developers or store administrators for a favour and get an instant response.
Yesterday I decided to build snapd for CentOS 7. Originally titled the post “… in ten minutes” but the process took more like an hour to complete as I wanted to fix some rough edges I found along the way. One day later the improvements and bug fixes I had made are merged upstream and I can tell my story.
Preparations All of the instructions that follow were done on a stock CentOS 7 installation, running kernel 3.
Classic? Before we can discuss today’s topic I need to untangle a rather confusing concept. Snapd cares about naming a lot. We really try to do our best to name things in a consistent and clear way. We don’t like to create error messages from hell and force the user to google crap to understand what the computer just said.
Well, we didn’t get one thing right though: the term classic, currently, may refer to:
The story about getting snappy into other distributions
A while ago I compiled a wiki page that documents where are we with support of snapd on various popular distributions.
Unfortunately the table there may look a bit bleak. Apart from Ubuntu and Debian most of the other distributions don’t ship snapd today. Since a few people were asking me about this (after all I was supposed to get this to work). I think some explanations are in order.
I’ve decided to abandon blogger and switch to Hugo. This move was long overdue but I always lacked the time to investigate what to switch to.
As you can see I finally made the hop and I don’t want to look back. Over the next few days I will copy all the content from blogger and splice it here (conditions apply). If you actually bookmarked my old blog please update your bookmark to point it at https://new.