Availability of snapcraft on AlpineLinux

Question

I was looking for compatibility between snap package management system and alpine linux but could not find any relevant resources. Is there any plan to make it available on alpine linux? Any progress being made in that regard?

Answer 1

To be clear: there are two components here: snapd, which is responsible for running snaps, and Snapcraft, which is responsible for building/creating snaps. You specifically asked about Snapcraft, which unlike snapd, is currently Ubuntu-specific. This is due to the fact that it assumes build- and stage-packages are debs, and tries to use apt (and apt python bindings) to get them.

This is currently changing to be more extensible, with RPM support to probably be added first. Alpine will likely need apk support there.

Another feature coming soon will be to build in lxd containers by default. This may be the easier path, where Snapcraft can run natively on Alpine but then build packages using an Ubuntu container.

If you're curious about snapd, you can see from this table that Alpine does not currently seem to be a target. However, please do log a bug requesting that it be put on the roadmap.