LXD Provider requires a local installation of LXD on macOS

[jat-canonical]

What needs to get done

Allow LXD provider to work with a remote LXD cluster so that builds on non-linux hosts like windows and macOS can become faster. I have asked for a similar requirement in Snapcraft repo as well here.
Hoping to get some traction and insight here.

Why it needs to get done

Currently the LXD provider checks for a local installation of LXD which is not possible for non-linux platforms. Please correct me if I am wrong here but most of the craft tools require only a client side implementation of the providers and offload the actual building by using mount/transfer options available for the provider to run the building process on the source package.
So giving the option to use a remote LXD cluster for packaging things instead of relying on multipass could make things faster as well since multipass always launches a new vm which is a rather heavy operation as compared to a container.

Propose Solution:
Making an LXC client that is correctly configured to a reachable lxd cluster, the required dependency could solve this problem ?

[mr-cal]

Thanks for the suggestion. We have had a few requests to support remote LXD servers.

Craft-providers already has most of the work implemented to support remote LXD servers. I made a proof of concept a year or two ago. However there is a lot of work remaining to define and implement the application-side code and ensure a good UX. For example, the remote LXD server could be running on a different architecture, so we need to query the server when filtering a build plan.

[syncronize-issues-to-jira]

Thank you for reporting us your feedback!

The internal ticket has been created: https://warthogs.atlassian.net/browse/CRAFT-2553.

This message was autogenerated

[jat-canonical]

Yeah makes sense. Also it would be really great if we can replicate the same functionality for the client side on charmcraft too once we get this over the line.