Auto-connection for gnome-3-24 content interface

[niemeyer]

@seb128

The GNOME platform snap is published by the Canonical account but Gustavo didn’t want us to use that one for the applications so Ken has published those under his account (and other team members are going to do the same) so the publisher is different?

I didn’t say you shouldn’t use that one for applications.

What I said was actually this:

@niemeyer

We can already try to define a base line, though. At a bare minimum, it sounds like such snaps need to be maintained by a well defined group of people, with a clear plan including security updates, and under known terms which include what level of support is offered and for how long. Without any of those we can’t really claim the snap is supported.

If we have that for a snap then it seems fine and somewhat expected that it’ll be published under the organization account, and ideally we should make those terms and processes more clear. If we don’t, then it feels more like a personal initiative without a stronger commitment from the organization, and might be published under the personal account, at least for the time being.

So it’s just a matter of making it clear that it is maintained by a team at Canonical (and will continue to be) and having some information available so we can tell which snaps those are and what is the maintenance plan, ideally here in the forum.

With that said, part of the point of that particular content interface on gnome-3-24 as I understand it is being a base for other snaps to rely upon, so being able to auto-connect it sounds interesting nevertheless. The point above by @lucyllewy already shows that being desired.

I’d like to thread carefully while doing that though, only because this is the first time we’ll be opening up that specific door, which means we have very little experience with that sort of interface being public so far. To that end, can you respond to @jdstrand’s question above in a bit more detail:

@jdstrand

Can you confirm that you want this snap to auto-connect for snaps from any publisher? If so, can you also comment on the stability of the libraries, APIs, ABIs, etc of the gnome-3-24 snap and any other information stating the promise of updates to this snap not breaking 3rd party publishers?

From the name of the snap and its interface, it doesn’t look like that was accounted for. In particular, that snap and interface are globally visible, not only across multiple distributions but also across multiple versions of those which will span several years. What happens when there are ABI breakages that take place because not Gnome itself but the underlying infrastructure changed? How should one pick the right “gnome-3-24” snap and interface?