Feature Request: Make a Snap package

[lmauromb]

For an easier/maintainable Linux installation I think it would be awesome to have a snap package for every release.

[vovimayhem]

Looks great @lmauromb !!!! I'll take a deep dive into it.

[vovimayhem]

@lmauromb: I spent some time fiddling around snap builder and reading through the whole snapcraft site.

While it does look like a very interesting product. I found the info on the landing page a bit misleading on first glance: I thought it was a service that published the binaries to different repositories for package managers. It is not really the case, and I have a couple of issues we need to further discuss:

• It requires the user to install snap, so they can be able to install plis... which makes it "yet another package manager" the user needs to have besides the one in their distros, and another package manager we (with your help, maybe?) would need to support.
• The common use case of snap is to deal with apps that have a lot of dependencies too complex to leave for a package manager to deal with. plis is rather a single binary file with no dependencies whatsoever. Which leads me to the next point:
• effort-vs-benefit / The use base of snap: How many users are using snap vs their distro package managers, such as apt, yum, apk, aur (see AUR and local builds #17), etc

I did a quick search on google, but couldn't find anything about the use base for snap. Do you have any info on this?

[vovimayhem]

https://youtu.be/0z3yusiCOCk

[vovimayhem]

Dude this is actually like Docker for desktop apps... I feel this is an "chicken or egg" conundrum...

[vovimayhem]

@kurenn @thelastinuit feel free to chime in!

[lmauromb]

@vovimayhem

My suggestion came for the future updates of the project; since snap its your only dependency you can update plis regularly without the need to rely on things like PPAs for the Ubuntu family.

Also, as snap is already installed in Ubuntu and available through the main repos for the major distros (Fedora, Debian, Arch), we can assume that snap is not a hard dependency to fulfill and many users would not find difficult to install it.

Examples of using snap for Linux support:

• Terminal editor micro.
• Rocket.Chat.
• Linux Steam Integration

Maybe a better first attempt could be a PR with a snap build, instead of TODO for the next version.
I think I can work on it, and we can discussed it later on. What do you think?

[vovimayhem]

@lmauromb OK! That does sound like a plan!