Snappy Packaging Happenings In The Fedora, Arch Space

This week Canonical hosted a Snappy Sprint in Heidelberg, Germany where they worked to further their new package management solution originally spearheaded for Ubuntu Touch. This wasn't an Ubuntu-only event, but Canonical did invite other distribution stakeholders.

Coming out of this week's event were at least positive moments to share for both Arch and Fedora developers. The Arch snaps package guy made progress on snap confinement on Arch. Currently when using Snaps on Arch, there isn't any confinement support, which defeats some of the purpose. There isn't any confinement support since it relies upon some functionality in the Ubuntu-patched AppArmor with that code not yet being mainlined. Arch's Timothy Redaelli has got those AppArmor patches now running via some AUR packages. Thus it's possible to get snap confinement working on Arch, but it's not yet too pleasant of an experience.

While Fedora developers have been working hard on Flatpak as their secure packaging alternative to Snappy, Neal Gompa was present for getting Fedora some representation. Neal shared his notes from this week's Snap sprint via this Fedora mailing list post.

The Snap highlights from the Fedora perspective include the apparent willingness for Canonical to see it on distributions outside of Ubuntu, SELinux-based confinement (rather than AppArmor) is an apparent "very high priority", detection and auto-configuration of confinement is coming, Snapcraft is being reworked to not be Ubuntu specific, snaps AppStream metadata support is coming, Fedora packaging of Snaps continues to be worked on and more.

Neal Gompa commented, " I know that the [Fedora] Workstation WG is very much behind Flatpak right now, but I see no reason that we cannot offer both. In fact, it is in the best interests of our users to fully enable both systems to the best extent we can, so that they have the freedom to develop and use applications as they see fit."