[ros-users] [Discourse.ros.org] [General] Ubuntu Core and snap packages in production

[Kyle]

Hey there @msadowski, thanks for opening a thread! I'm a ROS nut, but also one of the snapcraft maintainers, so I hope that I can answer your questions.



[quote="awesomebytes, post:2, topic:5002"]

I have no sources for what Im gonna say but I remember connecting ROS components with snaps was impossible/a pain. As snaps were by default isolated (like a Docker image if you use Docker) you could not connect, say, a snap running roscore and a snap running something else like the navigation stack.

[/quote]



This was true in the past, but less so today. Please see this [write-up](https://kyrofa.com/posts/distributing-a-ros-system-among-multiple-snaps). I'll admit it's still not the easiest thing, but I know of a few companies using it.



[quote="msadowski, post:4, topic:5002"]

however for development it seems like a lot of burden, especially in cases where you want to develop in incremental steps and test on the robot as you go.

[/quote]



Yeah, it's a bit like packaging your ROS system as debs just in order to test on the robot: no one really does that either. Put any sort of packaging step in the development iteration loop and things slow down pretty quickly. Snaps are currently very much a deployment/update tool (get a prototype working outside of snaps, then productize it using snaps). We're actually working on making iteration a lot better this cycle, and you'll see some improvements already in the next release, but we're not there yet.











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