Hello Alistair Thank you for the detailed answer. I understand that at the moment going for a Pharo snap package does not seem to be useful.
In particular as a Pharo installation may reside in a directory with everything included. So different Pharo installations may reside in different directories. I think where snap still might come is for solutions which require more than a particular Pharo installation. For example I could think of combining a particular Pharo version with a particular Jupyter notebook installation into a snap which could lead to a web based 'Dynabook' solution. I am also looking forward to Guille's answer. Regards Hannes On 8/23/18, Alistair Grant <akgrant0...@gmail.com> wrote: > 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 > >
