Best way to key a snap for reviewing

1

I’m investigating if we could use ODRS [1] to review snaps. I’m trying to work out the best value to key the review with. The options seem to be:

  1. Use the snap name. The downside (?) of this is snaps made by different people would then have different reviews. (e.g. libreoffice and libreoffice-rancell). I also remember that snap names were supposed to be transferrable - is this still the case? If it was then reviews for the old package would show for the new one.
  2. Use the snap id. I can’t find an exact definition of how this is generated - is there one? Can you ensure that libreoffice will continue to use the same ID for all time? Or is an ID only applicable to that particular version of the snap? This has the same downside (?) as 1. in that each libreoffice would have separate reviews.
  3. Use an AppStream ID. There was some talk about including AppStream IDs in the snap metadata. The downside is only snaps that contain an ID would be reviewable. I think we can infer the ID from the presence of a .desktop file!?

Thoughts?

[1] https://odrs.gnome.org/

2

IMO, user reviews and ratings would be a wonderful thing to have so thank you for looking into this.

The snapd ID should be the same always (unless something has changed in the design-- having architects/store people comment authoritatively here would be great). AIUI, the design supports changing of the snap name, etc, but the snap ID is supposed to always be the same.

I think reviews must be tied to the snap ID and not the name. We want ‘libreoffice’ and ‘libreoffice-rancell’ to be differently reviewed and rated-- in this manner competing snaps of the same software can be properly compared by users, with the best bubbling to the top and the worst going out of view.

Transferring of snap IDs from one publisher to another needs to be carefully considered-- we wouldn’t want poor reviews of an initial pre-transferred PoC snap to impact an official snap, but on the other hand, I don’t think we’d want to necessarily reset the scores/reviews because a popular snap that transferred ownership might end up going from the top of the list to the bottom (I suppose as part of the transfer process there could be toggles to reset ratings, reviews, both or neither, but even that seems somewhat simplistic).

1 Like