Snapcraft Summit summary – day 2

by Kyle Fazzari on 1 February 2018

The second day of Snapcraft Summits tend to be particularly productive as all the participants get more familiar with each other, and this one is no exception. In addition to developers from CircleCI, Electron, Microsoft, Plex, and Slack, today saw the addition of our friends from ROSHub joining us to hack on their snaps.

Snapcraft recently (in v2.37) gained the ability to patch ELF files in classic snaps to have an rpath to load its libraries instead of relying on LD_LIBRARY_PATH. Some of the participants here ran into an issue with this new feature where they needed to set rpaths themselves, and Snapcraft overwrote whatever they did while patching. In a thrilling show of tactile force, Sergio Schvezov cranked out a fix for Snapcraft.

Snapcraft uses Click for its command-line interface. Click requires a locale to be set, and raises an ugly error if it’s not. Unfortunately, this is often the case in some of the environments that run snapcraft, e.g. CI systems that spin up a Docker container to build and push a snap. A few participants hit this, and it was pointed out to be a terrible experience, so Kyle Fazzari whipped up a feature that fell back to C.UTF-8 if it was available. It was reviewed and available in the edge channel before the room could blink.

In a similar vein, there were a number of issues discovered with the Snapcraft docker images, and Kyle devoted some time to making them shine with an eye toward rewriting the CircleCI tutorial to be much simpler.

There has been some interest in adding a Kotlin plugin to Snapcraft. We finally have the skills and experience together in the same room to make it happen, so Leo Arias devoted a good chunk of time to working on his first Kotlin snap: ktlint.

Leo also worked with James Henstridge to make a plan for integrating with Gnome Builder. The idea is to start with fairly basic integration to gauge interest before undertaking the more in-depth Snapcraft work required.

Newsletter Signup

Related posts

Creating Snaps on Ubuntu Touch

This article was written in collaboration with Alfred E. Neumayer of the UBports Project. Tablets, phones and current technology’s capabilities are phenomenal. Who would have thought a thin, light, barely 10 inch device would provide all the power necessary to run Virtual Machines, wherever one desires while powered on battery? That a sma […]

Managing software in complex network environments: the Snap Store Proxy

As enterprises grapple with the evolving landscape of security threats, the need to safeguard internal networks from the broader internet is increasingly important. In environments with restricted internet access, it can be difficult to manage software updates in an easy, reliable way. When managing devices in the field, change management […]

We wish you RISC-V holidays!

There are three types of computer users: the end user, the system administrator, and the involuntary system administrator. As it happens, everyone has found themselves in the last group at some point or another; you sit down to perform a task relevant to your needs or duties, but suddenly the machine does not work as […]