Do you really need LXD?

[Wimpress]

@rswindell At the time of writing snaps need to be built using an Ubuntu 16.04 host/container/VM. Installing LXD allows you to run Ubuntu 18.04 yet still build in 16.04 containers. More importantly, using LXD containers and snapcraft cleanbuild ensure you have a clean build environment for your snaps.

However, we do realise that using LXD and snapcraft cleanbuild is not an obvious route. To remedy this the Snapcraft team have been working on “Build VMs” to transparently create clean build environments for you. You can read more about it here:

[DRAFT] Consistent Build Environments: Build VMs

This is an initial draft subject to change Introduction snapcraft has always assumed that the build environment the developer was triggering the build from was the appropriate one for the snap at run-time. This assumption has many fallacies from the point of view of the current environment. It assumes the association with what is called the core snap today is well known and that it is based out of Ubuntu 16.04LTS. Furthermore, when building on an environment different than Ubuntu…