Hi Hannes, On Wed, 22 Aug 2018 at 17:20, H. Hirzel <hannes.hir...@gmail.com> wrote: > > Hello > > Are there plans to do a Pharo 6.1 snap package in the upcoming > months? (Ubuntu 18.04.1)
I haven't been thinking about it really, because: - The big attraction for me was the ability to easily run 32 bit Pharo on a 64 bit OS without installing all the dependencies. But now that 64 bit Pharo is stable that driver has largely gone. - The sandboxing is quite limiting for a development environment, so if you want to run commands on the localhost you end up doing something like ssh'ing the command to localhost. - The snap runtime environment is still quite immature - I've had to deal with bugs in snapd, the gtk desktop interface, loading 32 bit executables, etc. - The snapcraft build environment is still evolving, so I have to keep up with the changes. - I was originally compiling the 32 and 64 bit VMs as part of the build process, but that is problematic as the 32 and 64 bit libraries tend to interfere with each other making the build process unstable. - You can't run multiple versions of a snap on one system, e.g. we can't have Pharo 6 and Pharo 7 installed simultaneously under the one snap name (pharo). I tried to register Pharo7 so pharo could be the GA version (6), but never got a response. I was listening to an Ubuntu podcast just this week where one of the hosts tried installing 4 packages via snaps and ended up going back to debian packages for 3 of the packages due to problems, so it obviously still isn't mature. I realise that every software package has its own issues, I'm sure someone from the snap community could find parallel issues with Pharo, but it wasn't where I wanted to be spending all my time. If someone wants to take it over, I'm more than happy to pass it on (although it isn't building at the moment due to changes in snapcraft). If there is enough interest I'll try and update it to run Pharo 6.1. If Guille is actively maintaining his package, maybe we should move to that (I haven't looked at it). Cheers, Alistair
