Apt installing a snap package for lxd

in another thread it was mentioned that on ubuntu 18.10 installing lxd with apt really performs a snap install of lxd. i have not yet studied how snap works so i don’t know. does this mean that looking up the list of files that will be installed using apt-file will give the wrong list or otherwise fail? or is this a broader issue by canonical that will break lots of package management tools that currently understand only the various repository files?

can i download the .deb file for lxd on 18.10 from somewhere? can i install it where there is no internet connected?

Starting with Ubuntu 18.10, LXD is only available as a snap. There are no more .deb packages built for it.

The existing deb package in the archive was indeed transformed into a shim which pulls in the snap from the store and migrates any existing data over.

The recommended way to install LXD is using snap install lxd, the deb shim is only there for upgrades and shouldn’t be used for new installations.

Snaps can be installed offline by using snap download on a system to download both the snap itself and store assertion, then transfer and feed that to your offline system.

i hate getting off topic here, but is there a way to get a list of files that will be installed, such as one gets with apt-file?

I don’t believe the snap store provides such a file index, no.

Note that this may be a bit less relevant than with debs though as the file list of debs was originally designed to detect two packages installing the same file and dealing with such conflicts. As snaps are effectively read-only squashfs-es which are mounted in their own path, such collisions aren’t possible.

so that means the newest Ubuntu will have lxd in a new place …the snap squashfs.

Yes, with snaps, all of the applications are inside /snap and all of the data inside /var/snap, nothing else is written to the filesystem of your system.