deprecate Snapcraft and AppImage

[ianconsolata]

I shared a doc (https://www.notion.so/pl-strflt/Lotus-Release-Channels-d475107f696b4669b5a0468194efb5a1) about which release channels we support, and suggesting we deprecate AppImage and Snapcraft. I just took a look again, and they are both still broken, and there is no clear path to fixing them. In the case of Snapcraft, their automated review added a new check which started failing Lotus, and none of their recommendations for fixing the issue work. For AppImage, the software we use to build the AppImage broke recently due to a malformed ubuntu version string. I brought this up in Slack, and we agreed to remove them immediately. To fully close this ticket, the following must be completed:

• remove from docs
• remove release automation
• publish placeholder project with deprecation notice to snapcraft
• remove snapcraft from release-metrics-exporter

[ianconsolata]

Documentation Updated:
filecoin-project/lotus-docs#471
filecoin-project/filecoin-docs#1569

[ianconsolata]

Merged: #10090

All that remains is to deploy the deprecation notice to Snapcraft.

[rjan90]

Hey @ianconsolata! Just checking in here, and was wondering if we already have sent deprecation notice to Snapcraft? And if not, do you have any pointers to where we can do that? 😄

[ianconsolata]

Ah, shoot. Dropped the ball on this. I think since Cory left, I am actually the only one with access to our release channels. All that needs to be done is:

• create a forked version of lotus that replaces all commands with a small message stating that Snapcraft is deprecated.
• deploy that to Snapcraft

It's pretty simple, I think I will have time to do it this week. Thanks for the reminder ping!

[ianconsolata]

@rjan90 Have the deprecated version ready to go here: https://github.com/ianconsolata/lotus/tree/snapcraft-deprecation

What I did was branch of v1.18.0 (it doesn't really matter where I branch from, as long as it has the right snapcraft build steps) and I replaced all the build steps with commands to build the deprecation notice binary (./cmd/snapcraft-deprecation/), which prints the following message:

Lotus is not distributed through Snap anymore (#10002)
Please install Lotus using another method from https://lotus.filecoin.io/lotus/install/prerequisites/

I set it up to run in CircleCI (which has the correctly configured build and deploy environment) when merged to the snapcraft-deprecation branch. I can't currently submit a PR to do that though, because that branch doesn't exist on filecoin-project/lotus.

In order to finish deprecating, someone with permissions push my branch to the filecoin-project/lotus project with the same branch. That should build the deprecation binaries, and push them to all release channels.

[rjan90]

Thank you so much @ianconsolata 🥇! I will try to open a PR with your changes, or get some additional help from the devs