snapcraft

Reviewing pull requests for snaps has been pretty terrible ever since snaps were introduced. There are a few very simple reasons: Building snaps locally in order to review is too much work. This is a fine place to start, but it doesn’t scale, especially if it takes any amount of time to build the snap in question (mine takes over an hour). Most CI engines use Docker. You can build snaps in docker with hacks and tweaks that sort of work sometimes, but it’s not a supported approach, and it’ll just randomly break next week....

The Nextcloud snap updates automatically. By default it might happen any time, although you can configure that. The snap provides a wonderful, user-friendly indicator that an upgrade is happening: it will become unresponsive and unvisitable until the upgrade has finished. Okay, I’m kidding, this is terrible and something we know we need to work on. My point is, there are times when your snap isn’t responding properly, and you want to know WHY....

If you’re an avid reader of the blog (and come on, who isn’t?), you’ll know that I’ve been maintaining a snap for Nextcloud since Nextcloud came into existence. Originally, though, that snap wasn’t called “nextcloud”, it was called “nextcloud-kyrofa”. My original goal was that I would bootstrap the snap for them, and then they’d take it over when they were ready. I hosted the code as a personal project on GitHub....

The snapcraft CLI (the tool used to create snaps) has long had support for building snaps that use both ROS 1 and ROS 2. ROS 2 Foxy Fitzroy is the latest ROS 2 LTS, which runs on Ubuntu 20.04 (Focal Fossa). The snapcraft CLI recently gained experimental support for building Foxy snaps, so I wanted to walk you through doing exactly that with the goal of helping both of us: getting you familiar with this new feature, and at the same time getting some mileage on this so as to make it not experimental....

I’m a few weeks late on celebrating Nextcloud’s four year anniversary, but I’m doing it anyway! My how time flies. I became a part of the ownCloud community back in 2012. Heck, you can still find blog posts about how I ran it on this very blog if you scroll down far enough. Then, in 2015, I saw the post about the Western Digital/ownCloud collaboration on what would eventually become the Nextcloud Box....