The Future of the Docker Snap

Is the issue here that a volunteer is needed to maintain?

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The docker snap is incredibly outdated by now. However, Ubuntu still suggest installing the snap as first option when a docker command isn’t found. Moreover, the snap is currently published by “Canonical”, which implies that it’s maintained and vetted by Canonical; which it is clearly not.

Example:

$ docker pull mariadb

Command 'docker' not found, but can be installed with:

sudo snap install docker     # version 18.06.1-ce, or
sudo apt  install docker.io

See 'snap info docker' for additional versions.

This snap should either be delisted or updated. Having an outdated snap for docker, a very popular app on both desktop and server, gives snaps, Canonical and Ubuntu a really bad name.

Hi, we do have an updated version of the docker snap (v18.09.3) in the edge channel, we need to wait until snapd 2.38 had been fully released before being able to completely update the docker snap, but now that it is mostly released we are testing it and will release it to stable when ready. Note that we are also still waiting on the snapd snap to be updated to 2.38 as well, as that is currently still on 2.37.4. Once the snapd snap has been updated to 2.38 we can proceed with the release as expected.

You may try it out currently with:

snap refresh docker --edge

And report back if you have any issues using it.

Thanks

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Thanks for the quick reply.

Setup instructions often contain the following additional commands to execute before using docker.

sudo addgroup --system docker
sudo adduser ubuntu docker
newgrp docker

Is this still the case with the docker snap? If so, I’d like to add these instructions to the info page of the snap. Is the source repo of the snap somewhere on Github? The original repo by docker is archived.

You can use:

assumes: snapd2.28

To ensure that only people with snapd 2.28 will get the update.

I suppose you meant assumes: snap2.38.

I am taking the opportunity to ask if all the valid assumes entries or patterns are documented anywhere.

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Yes, I’m aware of the feature, however it wasn’t clear to me what happens if we release a snap to stable that has assumes: snapd2.38 and a user is still on 2.37, when does the snap that depends on snapd 2.38 get refreshed?

As explained above at The Future of the Docker Snap the snap’s source code is on launchpad.

You do not need to create the user and group, but if you do not then you need to run docker with sudo.

Check out Snapcraft top-level metadata

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I think it is “snapd” but I didn’t check. There are no other valid assumes statements, we only implemented this one AFAIR.