@bashfulrobot Yes, initially we started snapcrafters (group)as a way to quickly bootstrap a bunch of snaps into the store, and have a central place where ‘snapcrafters’ (people) such as yourself could put a snap which is building on behalf of an upstream software vendor. We too have had conversations with developers who are not interested in distributing Linux packages or snaps specifically. That’s fine of course. We need to understand why, so that we overcome misconceptions, inaccuracies or flaws in snapd or snapcraft themselves. Typically we will have a conversation with a developer and capture that in the form of bug reports, better documentation or tutorials - where appropriate.
In the end though, our goal should always be to get things upstream, so developers are empowered to take control of the distribution of their software. We don’t want to be the middle-man who dictates when a stable release goes out to their users, and we want them to have access to the metrics about how many people are installing their application. Currently that data is locked away in the snapcrafters store account, which is not optimal. I think there are moves to expose some of that data on the snapcraft.io store pages, but only in aggregate form.
So ultimately I’d like to only see things in the snapcrafters repo where we have tried to upstream, but if they say ‘no’, we can own it.
One flaw of the snapcraft repo we’re working to fix is that for many applications we don’t get automatic builds in the store when a new release goes out. Typically someone (a snapcrafter) will bump the version line in the yaml as a pull request, and perhaps nudge the source-tag or source url to pull the latest release of software. This is manual and not optimal. We’re trying to automate ourselves out of existence here, by adding version-script and prepare steps which set the version accordingly.
That just leaves the release step of pushing to the stable channel, which requires someone (myself, Ev or Martin) to do the snapcraft release to stable, but I’m looking to how we can make that less manual too, without risking unstable software hitting the stable channel.
Does that answer your questions? 