Comment 2 for bug 1802541

I agree, while we could teach the store about it I think it is much easier to just have a special case value, like "base: none" that we can handle early on explicitly.

The problem with this approach is that it feels less transparent. Something may start as a pure content snap and then grow apps and the developer will be forced to understand bases, forced to pick a base (or use core implicitly) and then write the apps they need. It feels like something the compute ought to be able to figure out.

We might also change how "snap install" works. Instead of coming up with a list of tasks that is static, we could just download the snap, inspect it, download prerequisites that we found by analysing the snap and only then activate it. This would be somewhat more complex on the logic of task conflicts.