Would you be interested in adding snap support on Linux?

Feature description

NPM is a messy way for a user to install an app. Would you be interested in supporting a modern packaging format for your Linux users? Snaps, flatpaks and appimages would fit the bill. I’ve made a work-in-progress snap version at https://snapcraft.io/percollate which can be easily installed on any Linux distribution which supports snaps using snap install --edge percollate . I’d like to know whether it is worthwhile continuing to work on this, and whether you’d be interested in accepting the snap upstream when ready? There are issues with sandboxing clashing with snap confinement and at least one security issue to iron out as one of the generated binaries has an executable stack, but apart from this it already seems to run well.

Existing workarounds

It looks as if you’ve been working on docker support. For an end user, this is only marginally less messy than using npm. Supporting snaps or flatpaks would let users install your app from their favourite distribution’s software store.

Many thanks for building this useful application!

[mcphail]

I’d rather this didn’t turn into a debate about different package managers, which has been repeated a thousand times before. My experience has been with making and using snaps, and I’m happy to work on making one for this project. If there’s a flatpak which gets there first, I’d be happy to use that instead of a snap. I’m not knowledgeable enough about them to make one myself.

What I do know is that no solution is perfect, but any solution would be better than expecting a casual user to wrestle with npm. My proof of concept snap in the edge channel already “works”, barring the security issues mentioned above, and is straightforward to install for a huge number of Linux users. But all I want is to be able to use this application easily; if flatpak or appimage does the job first I’m happy to switch.

[pedrolucasp]

On Fri, Sep 25, 2020 at 04:56:27PM +0000, Neil McPhail wrote:

Alternatives would be flatpaks or appimages, but I’m much less familiar with those.

I strongly recommend that we should not support flatpaks.

About flatpaks: https://www.flatkill.org and https://www.flatkill.org/2020/