Easy path for the latest Jenkins in Ubuntu

[Evan Dandrea]

Hello!

I spent an evening putting something together that I think may be exciting for the whole Jenkins community. As of right now on any Ubuntu 16.04 system, you can run

    snap install jenkins

And Jenkins 2.8, with all of its dependencies bundled, will be installed on your system. This is especially important for users because Jenkins was removed from the Debian/Ubuntu archive some time ago and it’s been a pain point for them, so we’ve been working on helping upstream developers publish software directly to users in a discoverable manner.

The code is here:
https://github.com/evandandrea/jenkins-snap

I’ve set up snap builds of Jenkins master and I am publishing these to the “edge” channel once a day. You can install 2.9-SNAPSHOT with:

    snap install --channel=edge jenkins

Or if you’ve already installed Jenkins 2.8:

    snap refresh --channel=edge jenkins

Publishing this snap will also give Jenkins more visibility to users out of the box without them having to explicitly search for a repository, and will give your project more control of what is available in Ubuntu.

Let me know what you think about getting the snapcraft.yaml file in your repo so you can control exactly what gets built. Or if you have any questions, I’d be happy to field those too.

[Jesse Glick]

On Fri, Jun 10, 2016 at 12:31 AM, Evan Dandrea
<evan.d...@canonical.com> wrote:
> Let me know what you think about getting the snapcraft.yaml file in your
> repo so you can control exactly what gets built.

A PR to https://github.com/jenkinsci/packaging sounds like a good idea.

[Evan Dandrea]

Cheers. I've put one together:

https://github.com/jenkinsci/packaging/pull/57

[Samuel Van Oort]

I took an initial look at this as a maintainer for Jenkins Linux packaging -- I find the snap format itself rather interesting.  I am curious to see where it goes now that there's support for non-Ubuntu distros released from Canonical.  I like that it makes Jenkins more visible and discoverable for users, though.

The bad news: right now, I don't think this packaging is at the level of maturity (I've called out a couple points in the PR) that it would need to be for inclusion as a main distribution for Jenkins.  There are also some infrastructure issues with building on Ubuntu 16.04 in the main Jenkins packaging project (potentially solvable by docker use but a bit annoying). 

The good news: it would be a great candidate for a similar distribution path to the Docker image, where it initially is built up independently, and then once it hits an appropriate level of maturity, gets official inclusion and a download link on Jenkins.io.  I'd really like to see this packaging option get fleshed out further and hit that point, because I think there's some exciting potential. 

[R. Tyler Croy]

(replies inline)

On Thu, 16 Jun 2016, Samuel Van Oort wrote:

> I took an initial look at this as a maintainer for Jenkins Linux packaging
> -- I find the snap format itself rather interesting. I am curious to see
> where it goes now that there's support for non-Ubuntu distros released from
> Canonical. I like that it makes Jenkins more visible and discoverable for
> users, though.
>
> The bad news: right now, I don't think this packaging is at the level of
> maturity (I've called out a couple points in the PR) that it would need to
> be for inclusion as a main distribution for Jenkins. There are also some
> infrastructure issues with building on Ubuntu 16.04 in the main Jenkins
> packaging project (potentially solvable by docker use but a bit annoying).
>
> The good news: it would be a great candidate for a similar distribution
> path to the Docker image, where it initially is built up independently, and
> then once it hits an appropriate level of maturity, gets official inclusion
> and a download link on Jenkins.io. I'd really like to see this packaging
> option get fleshed out further and hit that point, because I think there's
> some exciting potential.

Evan, from an infrastructure standpoint, as Sam pointed out, we do not
currently have anything newer than Ubuntu 14.04 LTS in the cluster. I'm not
entirely certain if that is a problem for generation of the snaps (or whatever
the unit of snap is).

Could you link to some documentation or articles discussing the
distribution/hosting requirements for snaps? We currently operate dpkg and rpm
repositories on mirrors.jenkins.io and I would like to understand the hosting
requirements more here.


Sam, assuming we would be hosting a file or archive of some form, this isn't
quite the same as Docker, in that it introduces additional infrastructure
workload to get distribution working from the start.

>
> On Friday, June 10, 2016 at 7:16:15 PM UTC-4, Evan Dandrea wrote:
> >
> > On Fri, 10 Jun 2016 at 14:25 Jesse Glick <jgl...@cloudbees.com
> > <javascript:>> wrote:
> >
> >> On Fri, Jun 10, 2016 at 12:31 AM, Evan Dandrea
> >> <evan.d...@canonical.com <javascript:>> wrote:
> >> > Let me know what you think about getting the snapcraft.yaml file in your
> >> > repo so you can control exactly what gets built.
> >>
> >> A PR to https://github.com/jenkinsci/packaging sounds like a good idea.
> >
> >
> > Cheers. I've put one together:
> > https://github.com/jenkinsci/packaging/pull/57

- R. Tyler Croy

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