Cannot automatically build a part from a Debian package source tree

[Robie Basak]

This is a Wishlist request.

I have a source tree that supports building a Debian package. It has a debian/ directory with debian/control, debian/rules, etc. I can make a deb using "sbuild" or "debuild" and so on.

I'd like to make a snap out of this. A straightforward way to do this is to use "stage-packages" and include the deb I'm building. However, I'd like the resulting snap to match my source tree, which isn't necessarily the same as the deb that's available in an apt repository being fetched from "stage-packages".

One way to do achieve this is to build the deb locally first and then use the new package-repositories feature. However, this seems suboptimal because I have to write a wrapper that builds the deb, prepares a local apt repository, modifies snapcraft.yaml to point to it, and then calls snapcraft. And then facilities like Launchpad snap recipes become unavailable to me because they expect to be able to just run "snapcraft" and there's no mechanism to call my wrapper instead.

It would be nice if snapcraft had a "deb" part plugin that does all of this for me. It would expect to find a debian/ directory, build the deb as appropriate, and make it available for use in stage-packages/build-packages as normal.