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Comment by agentx3r | Hacker News Reader

Hear hear. I imagine for dogfooding, LXD is only packaged in snap, so we can't use apt as the source anymore. After migrating, an upstream push to a 'stable' LXD snap channel introduced a regression that borked our environments, and there was no way to:

1. prevent machines in the fleet from pulling the broken LXD update

2. rollback broken machines to the previously working LXD version on the same channel, since it no longer existed in the Snap Store™.

What a joke! Now we're burnt on snap _and_ LXD.

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Canonical packages LXD as a snap package. Other distributions can package LXD in their favorite packaging format, and some do.

Some developers are trying to package for Debian. The work is in progress at https://wiki.debian.org/LXD

I've been looking forward for this work to come to something working for some time already, but it's been already 3 years I've eyed on it, is it now coming to something working "soon"?

Debian is a bad choice if you want to package go applications (or rust apps, for that matter). Debian requires that all those little static dependencies be individually packaged. Common container software like lxd, podman, and umoci are not found in Debian.

The following distributions package LXD (that I know of):

* Void Linux

* Alpine Linux

* Arch Linux

* Gentoo

Some of those are more suitable for production installs than others, but if you know what you are doing and manage your deployments well, all of them could work.

Ahh Gentoo :) I once build-from-source think it was called stage-1 install on a SBC(Single Board Computer) 486DX. I compiled well over 4 days :D

I would add NixOS to that list. Especially if you value rolling back upgrades or pinning package versions.

I was not aware. Too late to edit now, but that is indeed a great option! Rolling release is a bit ambitious for a hyperlink without nixos like features.

Podman is in the NEW queue, and debs can be built from the packaging repo in the meantime., FYI.

Thanks for the info! Good to hear.

Do you happen to know _why_ Debian decided to require that for Go projects? It's so absurdly complicated.

I've been looking into .deb packaging for Caddy but it really feels like they require us to jump through too many hoops to make it happen. I'd much rather just ship a prebuilt binary.

I would love a deb-packaged Caddy as well :(

You'll be happy to know Caddy will have a deb package in the next release (albeit not part of official debian repos), see https://github.com/caddyserver/caddy/pull/3309

>It's so absurdly complicated.

Security. Dynamically linking stuff is always going to be better than statically linking. Do you trust upstream to keep track of security issues and rebuild in the absurd dependency tree that is Golang software? Or the multi-year old effort which is the current Debian security team?

The reason why it's absurdly complicated is solely on the Golang team, not Debian.

Funny. I have been working on a blogpost detailing the silly things I encountered while packaging LXD properly for Arch Linux. Should probably finish it up one of these days.

Yes, the situation with LXD packaging is ridiculous. I always wondered, do the maintainers really use it themselves for anything non-trivial?

Without too much details. But I personally got into LXD while bootstrapping kubeadm clusters with salt. LXD profiles made it very easy to work with compared to alternatives.

It's clearly not production stuff, but it works very well for a quick test bed before production deployments.

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