Suggestion to make zfsutils-linux a snap

[Sam Van den Eynde]

This circumvents the need to keep it on the same major version throughout the LTS cycle. LXD is doing snaps, perhaps for zfs this is the best approach as well.

Xenial still has zfsutils on generation 0.6, with the module on 0.7. Even when patches are applied as needed that approach has its limitations. E.g. the Bionic cycle might possibly see 2 major zfs releases, who'll say.

[Richard Laager (rlaager)]

Is there something inherent in snaps that makes this easier or better than debs? For example, do snaps support multiple installable versions of the same package name?

If snaps aren’t inherently better, the same thing could be done with debs using the usual convention for having multiple versions in the archive simultaneously: having zfsutils0.6 and zfsutils0.7 source packages producing similarly versioned-in-the-name binary packages (which in this case conflict as they are not co-installable). Each would depend on an appropriate kernel package that has the matching module. Then zfsutils-linux would be an empty package with: Depends: zfsutils-linux0.7 | zfsutils-linux0.6.

[Sam Van den Eynde (samvde)]

My main reason for suggesting this is that it seems Canonical is easier on snaps wrt. having rolling upgrades. I don't see a reason debs can't do it, but I notice over and over again Canonical is very conservative upgrading major software versions on debs (which is no criticism, just a constatation).

[Sam Van den Eynde (samvde)]

As kernels 5.2.0-x will bring zfs 0.8.x to Bionic LTS, I'd like to draw some attention to this request. People will get the 0.8.x zfs module via HWE but won't be able to do much with the major new features without the userland tools.

I tried to install the debs from Eoan, but they require a higher libc version which complicates that route a lot.

[Colin Ian King (colin-king)]

I'll put this on the wish-list agenda for 21.04

[Ted Cabeen (ted-cabeen)]

I would strongly discourage putting zfs-utils into a snap. I expect many systems admins running zfs storage arrays do not install snapd, and would be loathe to do so.

[Dimitri John Ledkov (xnox)]

LXD actually vendors multiple copies of zfs-utils tooling to be compatible with every target version of zfs they want to support.

Coinstalling multiple snaps and versioning functionality has been deprecated for snaps.

Adding tooling only snaps, or single or rainbow of versions might not gain much compared with an hwe deb. And even there things are questionable w.r.t. unintended pool upgrades.