I would like to request this snap be removed and revoked from the store.
I am not the owner, but I have reached out to the person listed in the contact info for the snap and have not received a reply.
Furthermore, it has latest in the name and has seldom been updated:
snap info telegram-latest
name: telegram-latest
summary: "Telegram Desktop Client latest"
publisher: pain7
contact: Dev9Ar@gmail.com
description: |
Telegram is a popular messaging protocol with encryption ...
snap-id: 2HRsGY7THIQWdKvzbrHACxrwUZuuDiWA
channels:
stable: 1.0.5 (4) 29MB -
candidate: ↑
beta: ↑
edge: ↑
This is a cause for user insatisfaction. I would want to clarify that if -latest weren’t to be in the snap name I would not be asking for a revocation.
Given that I don’t own the snap, I don’t mind if this takes as long as a discussion regarding this request is necessary.
I don’t think we have any precedent for this sort of request and I’m reluctant to be heavy-handed on it. If we had an upstream produced or endorsed plain “telegram” snap, we could feature it so it would return at the top of snap find results. As of today, no such snap exists.
I’ve also emailed the maintainer of this snap and didn’t get a reply. This problem actually deterred the GamingOnLinux editor from installing Telegram via snappy, little niggles like this really do annoy users too much.
@sergiusens can we move Telegram to the snapcrafters repo and publish it under snapcrafters as telegram? I don’t think it’s enough but it’s something and would work with what noise is suggesting (@noise would you willing to feature a snap published that way, since snaps in snapcrafters have a process for getting stuff distributed from upstream (and are maintained collaboratively by snapcrafters)?)
Checked the store and the address you’re mailing @sergiusens isn’t the one registered for this application. We should contact them on the registered address first, and offer to help update, transfer or otherwise the snap.
I fully agree this is horribly un-user-friendly and actually worsens the whole snappy experience (since some people may install Telegram as their first snap, figure that it doesn’t work and that snaps are garbage, and potentially never use snappy again). But we don’t have a proper procedure for doing this and arbitrarily removing it would seem an abuse of store manager power… How could a proper procedure for doing this be created?
@sergiusens can we move Telegram to the snapcrafters repo and publish it under snapcrafters as telegram? I don’t think it’s enough but it’s something and would work with what noise is suggesting (@noise would you willing to feature a snap published that way since snaps in snapcrafters have a process for getting stuff distributed from upstream (and are maintained collaboratively by snapcrafters)?)
Reading through this thread - this action seems reasonable. Are snapcrafter based snaps give priority in any way (not including the upstream)? My opinion (not that it means a ton - haha) is that this might help confusion with the multitude of duplicated snaps.
If there was a way to say list in the order of upstream, snapcrafters, 3rd party (with 3rd party being sorted by version number indicating activity).
I think this would be wise (it doesn’t happen at the moment as far as I’m aware), though the snapcrafters repo would need a documented authority structure/quality control as a semi-official snappy organization-of-sorts and it’s promotion above other sources of applications (where the applications are the same) could then be justified because of this authority structure and quality control and its stated aim to get snaps upstreamed (and its success in doing so).
I’d disagree with any revocation. One of the use cases for snaps was touted to be as a replacement for ppas. I have a snap package which is probably only useful for me, which I used to keep in a PPA. I’d hate for it to be revoked just because it annoyed someone in the store. Although, I admit, I had been misled by the telegram-latest package it was immediately apparent through snap info this was legacy and unmaintained. By all means adjust the store to deprecate old snaps but please don’t revoke them.
I agree with your use case and I hope the use case is conveyed in the name of the snap; the case here is one of misleading people with a popular application name, with an identifier which is even more blatant as it is nowhere close to latest.
We are working on improvements to snap find that should help longer term, particularly giving the ability to categorize snaps and scoring up snaps that are “promoted” in those sections. Meanwhile I think we can do two things:
As a store admin, I can contact the telegram-latest author and kindly request that they unpublish their snap.
@sergiusens could request the bare “telegram” name and repub his snap there.
I think if @sergiusens requested the base application name, plus moved it over to snapcrafters that would at least help clarify the situation in the short-term.
I think if @sergiusens requested the base application name, plus moved it over to snapcrafters that would at least help clarify the situation in the short-term until the new improvements come to light.
@bashfulrobot No, there’s not an order between providers, and I cannot imagine us ever doing something like that as it would be disrespectful with the snap community at large. The reason why snapcrafters are regularly part of such conversations is because it’s a very active community of snap maintainers, not because they have priority. So if we want to have some nice software up-to-date, they can help.
This is unrelated to revocations, orders, or any sort of priority.
@mcphail We would not revoke a name without contacting the publisher with reasoning and hopefully we’d have room for options (some cases we might not, e.g. legal action), and we always try to have such conversations publicly here, just as in the case of this very thread, so that it’s transparent and invites collaboration and discussion openly.
That said, the snap namespace is flat, so we’re all responsible for keeping it tight for us all to use it conveniently and appropriately. That means we will need revocations in some cases, and transfers, and renames. It’s all part of the job of maintaining a namespace sane.
Also note that in the case at hand it is the very owner of the name that is asking for it to be revoked, rather than someone asking for a third-party name to be revoked, and precisely in the interest of sanity. This sounds very reasonable to me. (see below)
Finally, it’s easy to make your own personal but public snap with a name similar to mcphail-telegram. Nobody else can argue about a name like this being improper or misassigned. It’s just your preferred flavor of some free software, with whatever version and patches you’d prefer to have on it.
@sergiusens I thought you were the owner of telegram-latest, but apparently not. Also, your snap info output shows a different output than mine. Mine says the publisher is “Saleh”? @noise?
Either way, we should absolutely not revoke this snap without approval from the publisher. The name is not fantastic, but that’s subjective and not a good basis for breaking other people’s snaps.
I don’t think it’s enough but it’s something and would work with what noise is suggesting (