Call for testing: chromium snap

snap
62

Here’s an attempt at clarifying the mapping between upstream chromium branches and the snap’s channels:

chromium branch snap channel
stable stable
beta beta
dev edge

The candidate channel is used for pre-release testing, nothing goes directly to stable without passing first through candidate and undergoing some automated and manual validation there.

As I mentioned in a previous comment, there is no canary branch for linux, and I see little point in producing builds off the master branch, it’s an unstable and fast-moving target, and it would consume build resources for little added value. People interested in testing bleeding edge should stick to the dev branch (i.e. the edge channel).

Occasionally, the beta channel may lag behind the stable one. That might happen when the upstream project bumps the version in the beta branch and almost immediately promotes it to stable. In this case the builds for that version go to candidate (then stable) directly without hitting beta first. That’s the case currently:

osomon@dantian:~$ snap info chromium
[…]
channels:
  latest/stable:    88.0.4324.96 2021-01-26 (1466) 142MB -
  latest/candidate: 88.0.4324.96 2021-01-26 (1466) 142MB -
  latest/beta:      88.0.4324.87 2021-01-16 (1455) 142MB -
  latest/edge:      89.0.4389.9  2021-01-22 (1462) 143MB -

stable has version 88.0.4324.96 whereas beta is lagging behind at 88.0.4324.87. Nothing to be worried about, as soon as 89 is promoted to beta things will get back to normal.

I hope this makes sense.

63

You have you own custom build logic for the snap and want to check that it works. But in normal conditions it was already tested on beta before. The only caveat is the behavior with upstream immediate promotion from beta to stable. Fine, keep candidate then.

Even if upstream pushes a new beta and immediately promotes it to stable, it doesn’t mean that snap’s beta should lag. Looks like a flaw in build configuration on your side. For a user visiting SnapStore it looks like an abandoned channel. I have Chrome Beta installed and it’s version is not 88.0.4324.87:

image

The definition of canary from upstream’s website: “Canary builds are the bleeding edge. Released daily”. Your edge isn’t nowhere near the upstream’s edge and has different version number, why not to rename it into dev?

After all it should look more like so:

upstream snapstore
stable candidate --> stable
beta beta
dev dev
canary -