mc-installer installs and runs the Minecraft Launcher inside of a Snap. Minecraft itself uses the .minecraft directory for game data such as savegames and mods. Many users expect their savegames and mods to be in that folder and are surprised when that’s not the case. They are also surprised that the Minecraft Snap doesn’t find the savegames in that folder. It’s common for users to manually copy their savegames to that folder when they get a new computer, for example. Given that many users spend hundreds of hours building their own worlds in Minecraft, those savegames are very important.
I’d like to request auto-connection for read and write permissions to that folder.
This should not provide any conflicts when multiple versions of Minecraft are installed because Minecraft supports this internally. Even without Snaps, it’s common and supported to have multiple Minecraft versions installed. The official Minecraft launcher allows you to download and install multiple different versions of Minecraft at the same time. The game itself warns you when opening an incompatible save file and gives users the option to migrate save data from one Minecraft version to the next.
Note: In case this influences the decision; mc-installer is an unofficial snap not affiliated nor endorsed by the Minecraft team. The binaries run in this snap, however, are the regular unmodified Minecraft binaries.
mc-installer is facing some issues at present and this auto-connect would likely help in fixing it. Currently, it’s non-functional. Any assistance here would be greatly appreciated.
Some context for reviewers: due to a bug in the latest Minecraft Launcher, it tries to use ~/.minecraft as data directory instead of $SNAP_USER_DATA/.minecraft. That issue might be solved if we were granted this auto-connect request. We found a temporary workaround for this issue, however, and Mojang is releasing a fix soon.
This auto-connection request is separate from that bug, however. As stated in the original request, access to ~/.minecraft will be very useful and provide a much better UX than what is currently possible, regardless of whether the bug in the launcher is fixed.
Apologies for not attending to this sooner - I think perhaps it was only flagged as store-requests recently - +1 from me for mc-installer to auto-connect personal-files named dot-minecraft with write access to $HOME/.minecraft. Can other @reviewers please vote?
