I just pushed a get-iplayer 3.09 (latest stable release) snap to the candidate, beta and edge channels for testing. Upstream it’s known as get_iplayer (note underscore). However limitations on snap/snapcraft mean I cannot use the underscore in the snap name itself.
In addition there is a cgi script in the package (which I just added in my latest update), upstream called get-iplayer.cgi. Full stops also cannot be used in my snapcraft yaml, so I called it get-iplayer-cgi.
Please can I request get_iplayer as an alias for get-iplayer in the store, as this is what everyone knows the upstream project as. Also please can I have get_iplayer.cgi as an alias for get-iplayer-cgi.
It’s finally been done! You have succeeded where I have failed (unless your snap has the same problems as mine (listed in my README.md))… I’d be very interested in seeing your snapcraft.yaml when it’s out
+1 on the aliases in terms of the names. I did verify (against 2.30) that aliases with ‘_’ and ‘.’ in the name work ok. The alias command simply creates symlinks in /snap/bin to the actual snap command in /snap/bin (as opposed to symlinking to /usr/bin/snap) which makes it easy for snap to resolve the app name (see resolveApp() in main.go which is used for completer scripts and running the actual command). All this means that in its current implementation, aliases are not limited to the same small restricted set of characters that snap commands are.
I’d like to get feedback from a core snapd developer that the design of aliases is meant to work this way (as opposed to the implementation just happening to do this) to ensure the implementation won’t change and break these aliases. @mvo or @chipaca, can you comment?.
Because aliases are either manually created in the store, or locally by a system administrator, I think it’s fine for snapd to worry a lot less about the sanity of them.
On the other hand, note (in snap/validate.go) that aliases must currently match ^[a-zA-Z0-9][-_.a-zA-Z0-9]*$. If that changes I’d expect it to be towards being less restrictive, not more.
Since the waiting period has elapsed and you have +3 votes, I’ve created the aliases as requested. I don’t do this frequently so for sanity I installed the snap and tested that get_iplayer.cgi and get_iplayer exist and invoke the corresponding snap apps. Give it a try and let me know if anything else is needed.
