Add snap packaging

[artivis]

Related

What

This PR adds snap packaging for the CLI/GUI together with a CI job to automatically build and release the snap.

The snap is already available on the store but isn't publicly listed yet. One can give it a try with:

snap install rerun --candidate

to try a 0.20.3 based build or,

snap install rerun --beta

for a build based on main (at 9699349332d27010e37edcc67b164530e13a07e7).

The Rerun's examples work fine both on an Intel integrated and Nvidia discrete GPUs on an amd64 arch. However more testing/feedback is required to make sure all features are working fine.

I currently own the name rerun on the store but I'd be more than happy to transfer it to the project maintainers if they decide to take on the support for this snap. I can also help in getting started 👍 .

Regarding the CI, it is currently a separate workflow that builds and tests (simply runs rerun help) the snap on PRs and pushes to main. It also publishes the snap on the store (once a Store login token is provided as a secret). It publishes the snap on the beta track for any push on main and on the candidate track on tags. Promoting the snap to the stable track is expected to be done manually after further testing.

I hope this is interesting to the maintainers and the community at large!

Please do feel free to hit me with any question/feedback.

[teh-cmc]

Thanks for the PR @artivis 🙏

Distro-level packaging is a pretty big topic, and we're not yet entirely sure how we want to approach this.

We'll get back to you once we know more.

Related:

• Publish rerun binaries on popular package managers #2108

[jleibs]

Hi @artivis thanks for providing this. It's definitely interesting and much appreciated, but unfortunately I don't believe it's something we can take on at this point in time.

We are currently stretched quite thin in terms of our internal build/CI/Release resources.

Although the job looks relatively straight-forward, I still have concerns about accumulating yet another thing that could add friction to our release process and ongoing maintenance.

I see that snaps for many other projects appear to be maintained as separate standalone -snap projects in the https://github.com/canonical/ organization. This seems like it would more closely align with how our conda, or nix packages are maintained. These tend to lag Rerun-official releases by a few days and depend more on generous community support to keep working.

Is this something you / Canonical might be interested in maintaining?

I'd be happy to subscribe to such a project and even notify maintainers of upcoming releases if they want to dry-run any alphas as we approach our releases.