Add parameter to cleanbuild to allow selection of a base image

[Matt Middleton]

the cleanbuild option should allow for an optional parameter to specify which image the generated container should be based up.

[Sergio Schvezov (sergiusens)]

What is the use case and how would it still be a cleanbuild?

[Matt Middleton (mmiddleton)]

The primary use case would be for building snaps for other versions of ubuntu. Upon release of Yakkety, snapcraft could be instructed to use a Xenial image in order to create a Xenial version of the snap.

[Leo Arias (elopio)]

I think I would like this too. We could preload some build packages in the image, and then cleanbuild would be a lot faster.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

[Expired for Snapcraft because there has been no activity for 60 days.]

[Alberto Mardegan (mardy)]

As a side note, it might be a good idea considering also the possibility to specify non-Ubuntu base images (and therefore packages lists). Not that I would personally use this, but I think it might speed up the adoption of snaps among developers of other distros.

[Galileo Sartor (lyzardking)]

This could be useful to select a specific version of ubuntu for now.
If in the xenial repo the library I need is not up to date or the correct version
I could run snapcraft cleanbuild --release yakkety
and this would run a build on a clean yakkety vm.

[Felipe Reyes (freyes)]

I implemented this adding a new config option to snapcraft.yaml (series)[0], but I'm not sure if this is the right way to do it, because some have said here that being able to set an arbitrary image is also a good idea. But the code is making assumptions about the OS[1].

Thoughts?

[0] https://paste.ubuntu.com/24843717/
[1] https://github.com/snapcore/snapcraft/blob/master/snapcraft/internal/lxd.py#L113

[Michael Hudson-Doyle (mwhudson)]

I have an implementation of this: https://github.com/mwhudson/snapcraft/commit/c095678a4e624043a269cd5a1fc30f4720964d11

I’m waiting for https://github.com/snapcore/snapcraft/pull/1718 to be merged first, which is waiting on snapcraft 2.35 to be released.

[Luke Faraone (lfaraone)]

mwhudson: FYI that PR has been merged c.f. https://github.com/snapcore/snapcraft/commit/834cfce4c805b584c0b1805ab7c71f25d59e3957

[Sergio Schvezov (sergiusens)]

cleanbuild is deprecated with bases.