PSA: classic confinement and core snapcraft issue

If you are trying to build using confinement: classic and have no base specified, you might be seeing error code 11 or 139 show up, or in other cases an error message about not being able to pip install.

This is a known issue and has so far been fixed on:

The issue is being tracked on LP: #1817300.

The backstory is, on Wednesday some update to the 16.04 archives made it so snapcraft could not build snapcraft. At that time, we only had reports of it being an issue with snapcraft itself and being python specific.

On Friday we were made aware of the aforementioned launchpad bug, which demonstrated that using classic confinment itself when no bases were used lead to this bad behavior.

As it turns out, previously used logic for classic confinment setups in snapcraft, which has since been deprecated with the introduction of the broadly used elf patching logic in snapcraft, was left over during that transition and starting Wednesday when glibc was updated triggered a libc6 mismatch.

We will update here when the docker images enabled for legacy are updated and when the snapcraft snap reaches the stable channel.

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snapcraft 3.2 is in beta now, should make its way to candidate soon.

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Thanks @sergiusens!

On a related note – since this impacts snaps that do not define a base:, is there a rough ETA on when the core16 base will make it to stable?

core16 is long ways ahead, there are plans for other mechanisms to trigger 3.0 features using core as a base, more on that after this rush is over :upside_down_face:

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Cool, and thanks again! :slight_smile: