New channel suggestion: oldest-supported

[pachulo]

Lately I've been updating my nextcloud instance in a more conservative way, which means that I only update to the next major versions once the one I have goes out of support; that's why right now it's on 20/stable and will stay there till October.

That also means that on that date I will need to manually update my instance to 21/stable so my instance is not on an unsupported version even for a day.

Being the channels concept one of the best features of the snap ecosystem, I was thinking about the possibility of having a channel for that use case: one that would follow the oldest supported version of nextcloud (oldest-supported as the tentative name).

Do you think that makes sense @kyrofa ?

Thanks!

[kyrofa]

I'm glad to hear you're following the older channels-- I'm not, which makes it easier than I'd care to admit to not take care of them as I should. However, as far as I'm aware, the ability to point channels to others isn't a feature that Canonical has deigned to expose to end users. Each of the supported channels you're talking about exist because I'm manually releasing each revision into each channel for each architecture. It's a bit tedious and there are lot of moving pieces, and this would just add another one. I'm afraid I would forget about it every once in a while, which would be worse than not having it in the first place, honestly.

[pachulo]

I'm glad to hear you're following the older channels-- I'm not, which makes it easier than I'd care to admit to not take care of them as I should.

No worries, that's my way to contribute a little back to the project. I really appreciate all your free time you invested here!

However, as far as I'm aware, the ability to point channels to others isn't a feature that Canonical has deigned to expose to end users.

That's a pity.

Each of the supported channels you're talking about exist because I'm manually releasing each revision into each channel for each architecture.

Actually, I thought most of the process was automated using snapcraft & launchpad...can you develop a little bit more on the release process?

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[r4co0n]

Please don't let this interesting conversation die, cleanup bot.

@kyrofa, could we try to automate your current release process as much as possible so forgetting stuff is impossible or at least results in errors/bugs somwhere?

[kyrofa]

I'd love to, but it basically requires writing my own CI system on top of snapcraft. I've actually done pieces of that in the past for the snap builder, but then snapcraft started using snaps to build go stuff in the next base (core18) and it broke our ability to (easily) build in docker, which broke the snap builder. I haven't had the fuel to rewrite it to run in lxd or a VM. And that's just for building a snap-- actually automating my release process would be quite the time investment indeed. It would actually be a product unto itself. I've been toying with the idea of making such a thing and selling it 😛 . Just not sure the demand is there.

[r4co0n]

We could try. Maybe an ansible role shipped with this source, bootstrapping both a development environment and automating releases, could be introduced? (Suggesting it as it is my go-to for this.) If snapcraft or other relevant tooling change how we ought to do stuff, we can at least blame a line in the deployment. That's progress, right? ;)

[r4co0n]

I have the development part already available for local builds, though pretty rudimentary and prone to some cleanups if someone else should ever fix it.

[kyrofa]

Here's a blog post describing that snap builder, in case anyone is curious.

[pachulo]

@kyrofa regarding this issue only, and while we still don't have the implementation you describe, do you think it would make sense for me to take on this duty? I mean, I'm already doing this for my own instance, so I could, for example, ping you when the time to update the channel did come.

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This issue is stale because it has been without activity for 60 days. It will be closed after 7 more days of inactivity.