Webdev on 20.04 (dotnet-sdk and node woes)

mattiasw · April 25, 2020, 9:19am

Morning all. I had a very late night yesterday getting my development environment up and running again after installing 20.04, and I ran into a couple of issues that I’m unsure of who/where I should report pertaining to snaps.

Very long story short, I installed 20.04 and I required 3 components to get up and running. Node.js, Dotnet-Sdk and Docker.

Installed all snaps and immediately had issues.

When building my app with dotnet I was stumped by the error:
“Process terminated. Couldn’t find a valid ICU package installed on the system/ Set the configuration flag System.Globalisation.Invariant to true if you want to run with no globalization support.”

Worse yet, the dotnet-sdk is not available in MS repos yet (even though their documentation claims it to be so) so for now, the snap is the only reasonable path.

After a lot of digging, I discovered that it was breaking because it was expecting to see libicu60 installed (20.04 repo only has libicu66).
I grabbed the deb from here (http://mirrors.edge.kernel.org/ubuntu/pool/main/i/icu/libicu60_60.2-3ubuntu3_amd64.deb), which fully resolved my dotnet issue.

Lastly I was having issues with a javascript executing docker-compose. I first suspected the docker snap was at fault because npm was working as exptected for me elsewhere, but I was able to exectue the same command in a shell without any issues. In the end I replaced node with the binary release and everything’s been working fine since.

So to recap. Docker snap works absolutely fine. Dotnet-sdk snap has a dependency issue when building and the node snap looks like it has some sort of permissions issue which I don’t have the experience to suss out exactly why it breaks.

Now, who should I report this to in order to be a good, if sleepy, samaritan?

dimitri · April 25, 2020, 12:11pm

I don’t have much experience with .NET so I hope I’m not saying something stupid here, but which MS repos and which documentation are you referring to? As far as I can see they support .NET up to Ubuntu 19.10:

github.com

dotnet/core/blob/main/release-notes/3.1/3.1-supported-os.md

# .NET Core 3.1 - Supported OS versions

[.NET Core 3.1](README.md) is supported on multiple operating systems per their [lifecycle policy](../../os-lifecycle-policy.md).

## Keys used in the tables

* **Bold numbers** indicate additions to this release.
* A '+' indicates the minimum supported version.
* Where possible, links to Distribution-owned lifecycle documentation is provided.

## Windows

OS                            | Version                       | Architectures  | Notes
------------------------------|-------------------------------|----------------|-----
Windows Client                | 7 SP1(**\***), 8.1            | x64, x86       |
Windows 10 Client             | Version 1607+                 | x64, x86       | 1607 is the minimum version for support. See [Out of support OS versions](#out-of-support-os-versions) below for Windows 10 releases that are no longer supported.
Nano Server                   | Version 1803+                 | x64, ARM32     |
Windows Server                | 2012 R2+                  | x64, x86       |

**\*** Windows 7 SP1 is supported with [Extended Security Updates](https://docs.microsoft.com/troubleshoot/windows-client/windows-7-eos-faq/windows-7-extended-security-updates-faq) installed.

This file has been truncated. show original

Ah, just found the following page. I guess Microsoft are currently in the process of rolling out support for Ubuntu 20.04, that’s why the instructions here don’t work (yet?). Perhaps wait for a few days.

As a workaround the .NET SDK can be installed manually:
https://dotnet.microsoft.com/download/dotnet-core/3.1

A GitHub issue refers to the missing packages for Ubuntu 20.04:

Another one refers to a libicu dependency problem:

dimitri · April 25, 2020, 12:24pm

About the snaps themselves:

I understand the Docker snap works for you.
On the other hand you have found issues with the Node.js and the .NET Core SDK snaps. Contact information for these snaps can be found on their respective pages:
https://snapcraft.io/node
https://snapcraft.io/dotnet-sdk

mattiasw · April 26, 2020, 8:25pm

Turns out I was off the mark regarding node. It was VS Code’s internal terminal that was overriding my path which was the culprit.

The dotnet-sdk issue has already been reported so I can wrap this up as a big “mea culpa”.

Thank you for your time.