Call for help: maintenance of the musescore snap

snap
21

OK, folks, I really need help. The insanity has gotten out of control.

Unfortunately that turns out to be false. I left revision 169 active. And behind my back, with no action taken on my part, snap has deleted that revision from my machine, along with its successor (190) which had the problem, and has replaced those two revisions with two other revisions (194 and 199) which also both have the problem.

So, please, I am begging you. I need help because I cannot simply unplug my internet to keep this malware from continuing to infest my machine. And at this point snap is definitely acting like malware from my perspective as a reluctant sysadmin.

In earlier messages I asked for several things and they have not happened. I humbly request advice about what is the correct escalation path to get these issues addressed so that I can:

  1. control what software is running on my machine without disconnecting my machine from the net, and
  2. contact and hopefully get support from whomever is creating these broken builds of musescore that keep getting pushed to my machine against my will. I need to be in touch with someone who is willing to be responsible for fixing the problems with the stuff they are pushing. If they are not willing to work on the problems, and instead will insist on pointing a finger at someone else, I would humbly request that they stop building and pushing stuff they are not willing to take responsibility for.

Please, please, please, I need the madness to stop and I respectfully ask each of you what you would do in my position. I do not know how snap works, I trusted others here who claimed to know how it works, and who apparently happened to be mistaken, and I have no idea where to turn for help now.

Music typesetting is one of the main things I do with my linux machine, and now this malware has, to a significant degree, disabled or at least made much more painful that important function of my machine.

Please can someone point me to the correct process for obtaining help with this kind of problem? I don’t know why the entire snap-affected world is not crying out about this, or maybe they are and I’m looking in the wrong place, but I beg you, please help me. I’m grateful for the advice I’ve been given here but the most basic things in that advice unfortunately have not worked for me so I don’t have any idea how I can proceed to restore my machine to a stable, working state.

22

MuseScore is published to the Store by the upstream developers. They have listed https://musescore.org/en/support as the place to get support for the Snap package.

23

Thank you for trying to help, but please see earlier in the thread where I explained why your advice turns out to be fruitless: Call for help: maintenance of the musescore snap

25

Have you tried to see if you encounter similar problems with other builds of MuseScore, such as the flatpak version or the AppImage version?

26

Sorry if I wasn’t clear, but when I mentioned “after you refresh”, I meant both manually triggered refreshes as well as automatic refreshes that snapd does. In this case it seems that snapd performed an automatic update (2 of them in fact it seems). If you would like to control when refreshes happen on your machine, take a look at https://snapcraft.io/docs/keeping-snaps-up-to-date as @ogra mentioned above

27

The appimage version is built correctly. The problems with snap have forced me to abandon snap and move to the appimage, which is working OK, but it means musescore is now a one-off thing on my machine that I have to update via a manual process different from everything else, so it’s far from ideal.

28

The keeping-snaps-up-to-date page explains that automatic refreshes can’t be turned off and there is apparently no way to make snap obtain explicit approval from me each time it refreshes an app, and no way to make snap allow me to roll back to any prior revision and stay there.

Maybe I’m missing something (but people keep repeating the same stuff, so it seems like I’m not)… but this all seems like straight-up malware bot behavior on snap’s part and given my limited understanding at this time, I cannot for the life of me understand how anyone thought it could possibly be a good idea to design things this way. It’s truly disappointing and frustrating to have this thing on my system and to have some apps depend on it rather than use mechanisms that can be meaningfully administered.

I realize this thread was not supposed to be about the overall merits of snap per se, so I will try to contain any further rants. Hopefully someone is listening anyway.

29

Well, the situation is getting worse:

and if we don’t fix the building with cmake plugin, it will definitely block the snap from updating once version 4 is released.

I don’t have the time to work on this, but the snap is installed by almost 16k users and “featured” since July, so I really think it would be a pity to let it rot.

I think that the best would be for it to be taken over by @Snapcrafters as upstream is not really interested in having this.