snapd is not included in server images

[Dmitrii Shcherbakov]

For some reason snapd is not included into Ubuntu Server images here http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-server/xenial/daily/current/

This can be seen by looking at the manifest:
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-server/xenial/daily/current/xenial-server-amd64.manifest

In contrast, images published at releases.ubuntu.com do have snapd installed by default:

http://releases.ubuntu.com/16.04.3/ubuntu-16.04.3-server-amd64.iso

# mount -o loop ubuntu-16.04.3-server-amd64.iso /mnt
mount: /dev/loop0 is write-protected, mounting read-only
# find /mnt/ -name '*snapd*'
/mnt/pool/main/s/snapd
/mnt/pool/main/s/snapd/snapd_2.25_amd64.deb

Server image manifests are not provided at http://releases.ubuntu.com/16.04.3/. Desktop manifests do contain snapd
http://releases.ubuntu.com/16.04.3/ubuntu-16.04.3-desktop-amd64.manifest
snapd 2.25

A customer reported that to me after installing a daily cloud image and trying to use snaps:
https://github.com/canonical-websites/www.ubuntu.com/issues/2718

Is there a reason for not including snapd into daily images?

[Dmitrii Shcherbakov (dmitriis)]

Looking at the releases page http://releases.ubuntu.com/

"The cdimage server also hosts releases of other Ubuntu images not found on this server, such as builds for less popular architectures and other non-standard and ***unsupported images***."

Which means that http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-server/daily/current/ will have unsupported images in contrast to https://cloud-images.ubuntu.com/xenial/current/

Does it mean that unsupported images should not contain snapd?

It's quite easy to confuse new users because to find out the distinction between cdimage and cloud-images support status one has to go to http://releases.ubuntu.com/ and read small text carefully.

[Adam Conrad (adconrad)]

The daily images have exactly the same setup as the 16.04.3 images you pointed to. snapd is not included in the base livefs, but is in /pool/ as a deb that gets installed over top if the 'server' task is selected when installing. If it's intentionally unselected, then it's not installed.

Furthermore, this has nothing to do with cloud-images, so marking that task Invalid as well.

[Steve Langasek (vorlon)]

Note also that the daily server images are "unsupported" because they are prerelease images for the point release and may be built with different options than are used for a final supported point release image that we want users to be using. Customers should be using www.ubuntu.com/download as the landing page for installs - there should be no confusion about fine print when they must've been following fine print to arrive at cdimage.ubuntu.com in the first place.

[Dmitrii Shcherbakov (dmitriis)]

{Steve, Adam},

Makes sense, ta.

I communicated back something along those lines.

I think one improvement that could be made is a large enough text/banner at those download pages saying that those images are not supported and should be used for testing only with links to release images or cloud images.

The way I see it, an official answer to something like this https://askubuntu.com/questions/458480/why-do-cdimage-ubuntu-com-and-releases-ubuntu-com-list-different-images should be present on a wiki page or canonical.com/ubuntu.com website.