Snap is inappropriate for our environment.
We (the upstream team) will not spend the significant amount of time required to do an Ubuntu deb package, the snap lets us reach a lot more distributions in one pass.
That being said, it’s absolutely fine for someone else (you?) to maintain deb packaging in a PPA or your own repository.
As more and more developers abandon packaging for containers, the fewer software packages will be developed with making packaging possible, and expecting the few people left who know how to do the work required for packaging is unrealistic. Even worse, knowing that pull requests for packaging support will be refused by upstream makes the situation even more dire, because nobody wants to work in a perennial fork.
Not sure what you’re on about, deb packaging never lives in the upstream code trees, it’s always stored separately on the side.
It’s similarly unrealistic to ask upstream developers to double the amount of work they do to support a very limited set of users on a specific distribution.
Ubuntu still has LXD as a deb in Ubuntu 18.04 (LXD 3.0.x) and we’ll keep that maintained until Ubuntu 18.04 becomes end of life. After that, we’ll only be publishing the snap.
Again, we have no problem with Ubuntu users maintaining a PPA if they so wish or other distributions shipping their own package, but upstream LXD simply doesn’t have the time to do packaging for all distros and the snap gives us a way to distribute the exact same thing to dozens of distributions very easily.
Here are the instructions for creating a .DEB from source.
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Tried it, it doesn’t work well and the lxd for debian project is dead due to the dozen plus dependencies that also do not have packages, for the reasons outlined above
https://wiki.debian.org/LXD
https://bugs.debian.org/768073
The packaging situation for the container community grows worse every year.
I sent you that link not to build a lxd .deb for debian but for ubuntu.
But if you prefer…
http://packaging.ubuntu.com/html/packaging-new-software.html
Also, as Stephane stated non-snap version of LXD is still in 18.04
Mark Shuttleworth stated last year that 18.04 would now be supported for 10yrs which means until 2028
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