Is a snap for Rapid Photo Downloader the right thing to do?

Hi, I’m the developer of Rapid Photo Downloader. Before I attempt to figure out how to make a snap for this program, I want to know if I should be. For example, the program

  • needs to be able to tell other processes to relinquish access to devices that are accessed exclusively, e.g. calling the gio unmount operation so that Gnome Files will give up control of a camera / phone, which is of course accessed via libgphoto2
  • expects to be able to read and write from/to the entire file system exactly as if it were not confined at all

I understand there is the new “classic confinement”, but it seems that ideas about the future direction of snaps are liable to significant change and that leads me to wonder if the relative freedom provided by this “classic confinement” is here to stay or is merely a transitional phase to something else that is as yet unspecified.

Thanks.

There’s work underway to cover use cases previously only handled by classic confinement (e.g. accessing arbitrary paths).

However, it’s important that released snaps continue to run without modification. Snaps are published by upstreams and ISVs who have an expectation of stable APIs. So even in a world with all cases covered, I don’t think classic confinement would be dropped on the floor.

That said, systems that prioritise security (i.e. Ubuntu Core) may refuse to install a classic snap.

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@damonlynch As pointed out by Evan, classic snaps are here to stay. At the same time, they are a transitional phase in that we want to ensure your use cases are completely supported while running entirely confined, but while that’s not the case and your snap depends on features that are only easily available via classic snaps, support for those won’t go away.

To give you some more assurance, we’re all currently running and working on release 16. It’s certain that no major modifications in that area will happen inside this series, since that would mean breaking backwards compatibility promises, so any potential changes can only come in release 18 one year from now, and even there we have no conversations to change anything in that regard. So we’re looking at 2020 for reevaluation, if at all.

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