[GNC] Snap Package Manager

[Geert Janssens]

Op maandag 16 april 2018 20:13:30 CEST schreef Fross, Michael:
> While I've installed some SNAPS on my Ubuntu machine, I've not used them
> extensively.  Would a SNAP distribution of GNC allow a binary release for
> all distros without having to wait for the package maintainers to update
> their repositories?
> 
> That would sure be nice.....
> 
In theory yes.

However unless the gnucash project integrates the release of snap packages 
into its release process you still end up "waiting for a package maintainer to 
update their repository". You can see snap as just another platform with their 
repository (with the added advantage it should cover more distributions). And 
this is by no means meant as criticism to any package maintainer (snap or true 
distro). I'm grateful they are volunteering their time for packaging our 
project!

In addition the battle of the "distro independent package format" hasn't 
settled yet. Ubuntu seems to favor snaps, fedora on the other hand prefers 
flatpak. And I thought there were a for additional competing formats... So if 
we want to support it straight from our own release process we would currently 
have to add at least 2 more platforms to our release list.

As other people are currently volunteering to do this for us, I don't see this 
as a priority within the project. However I do think there would be value in 
it in the long term as it would also allow us to more easily provide nightly 
builds for linux distributions where currently we can only offer them for 
Windows.

Geert