If you’re a user of the Nextcloud snap, you may have noticed that upstream Nextcloud released v12 a while back, but you’re still on v11. That’s because v12 introduced several regressions that made us maintainers decide to hold off on the upgrade. Thankfully, things are finally looking up. As of today, it seems that all the blocking regressions have been fixed. Which means that, barring any additional regressions being introduced between now and then, v12....

Were you busy today? Did you forget that Ubuntu 17.10 was released today (no way)? Perhaps you agree that Thursdays are lame for a party anyway? Walla Walla University’s ACM club is having their kick-off event, a joint retro video game and Ubuntu 17.10 release party, on Sunday, October 22nd from 3pm to 5pm! This event will be taking place in room 348 of Kretschmar Hall on the Walla Walla University campus in Walla Walla, WA....

You’ve heard it a million times: snaps bundle their dependencies. People seem to understand and accept the technical aspects of this, but today I want to talk about a more philosophical aspect. If you’re used to more traditional packaging, then you’re used to each project being standalone, e.g. Apache is its own package, with its own configuration; PHP is its own package, with its own configuration; and so on. As you begin creating a snap, perhaps one that bundles Apache, it’s easy to automatically gravitate toward wanting to make those config files available to your users as well....

When it comes to developing snaps, there’s a particular confusion out there that I see over and over again: build-time versus run-time. For example: “I’m building a snap, but I can’t seem to convince Snapcraft to place my config file in $SNAP_DATA.” In this post, I want to show you how to get the results you want. First of all, we need to clear something up. Snapcraft can’t actually do this for you....

My first foray into software development when I was a kid was as a web developer. I don’t admit this to many people, but the first language I ever learned halfway decently was PHP. I led a confused childhood. After that, though, I was introduced to Ruby on Rails, and I’ve been using it ever since. I don’t do web development professionally anymore, but I have a number of web-based side projects, making websites for friends or family....