Request for snap name "ares" - registered but unused

[Lin-Buo-Ren]

@syl21

On the other hand, we have Kyuyrii claiming my snap doesn’t work… without ever opening a single bug report. Not on my GitHub, not anywhere. Just a comment thrown on a forum. That’s your contribution?

To be fair, as long as the claim is valid it is still an (albeit minimal) constructive contribution.

@syl21

you’d rather spend your time digging through my GitHub issues and the upstream project to check whether I’m “legitimate” enough to maintain this package. How is that any of your business exactly?

Because these kind of redacted happen:

(118 days) Potentially malicious Cursor snap impersonating as an unrelated application

Hello, I would like to raise awareness regarding this snap: https://snapcraft.io/cursor. Which impersonates the high-profile Cursor - The AI Code Editor application: Similar application icon design(bottom: the genuine application icon) [image] In the same Development application category(see the aforementioned screenshot) Also has the impersonating application metadata set in its XDG desktop entry: [image] …while claiming to be an entirely different kind of application in the snap…

having the upstream preferred namespace is a significant trust indicator & privilege as it’ll be recommended by the command-not-found package:

brlin@brlin-fw13:~$ cursor
Command 'cursor' not found, but can be installed with:
sudo snap install cursor

and in turn many users will unknowingly install a snap that may be made by a malicious publisher.

As a result it shouldn’t be handed easily, hope this addresses part of your confusion.

[Lin-Buo-Ren]

IMHO, the proper way to do so is to:

Alternatively, try to communicate with the original publisher (when available):

The Tesseract OCR snap's maintainance could be improved

There are several problems I noticed while reviewing the Tesseract OCR snap currently published by @elopio: Version out of date: The version shipped in the store appeared to be a development snapshot build from 2020/12/24, while the upstream’s latest release is from 2022/12/22, nearly 2 years of updates to catch on Unreleased version: The published version appears to be an alpha build, which is not desirable for regular usage, no stable releases are published yet in the stable channel Lacking …

…then escalate it to the store staff if the situation doesn’t improve:

Ownership takeover request for the Tesseract OCR snap

Hello, I would like to request to take over the ownership of the Tesseract OCR snap currently published by @elopio. The snap is outdated and after the last communication attempt over a year ago(The Tesseract OCR snap's maintainance could be improved) I am unable to receive follow-up communication from them. Thanks in advance!

It WILL take time as multiple stakeholders exist, but it is definitely pursue-able.

[Lin-Buo-Ren]

@syl21

The ares developers gave me their approval.

This claim is also false according to Gemini 3 Fast LLM:

Quoted upstream response: https://github.com/ares-emulator/ares/issues/2385#issuecomment-3801237444
Full LLM response: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1WegiFr4O6AMk4zYmmdg-kj0vKEmxSOF0J5pvuJBshqc/preview

[Yasirel]

While I am not just referring to this specific case, I truly believe more staff is needed to oversee the store. I see too many instances of developers stuck in ‘manual review’ for weeks or requests for approvals that remain unresolved for far too long. If a developer is deeply invested in Snaps, they might wait; but others will simply give up and direct users toward alternatives.

​I assume this might be due to the current ‘Resolute’ development cycle. Nonetheless, I have been saying this for a month: Snap technology is already solid, but now the store needs to stop driving users away. It must prioritize maintained apps and delist those that aren’t. For instance, it is striking that the qBittorrent Snap hasn’t been updated in five years, while a maintained version exists under a more obscure name.

[Kyuyrii]

Regarding apps that are long outdated, there are those from the publisher nightmayr (Umayr Saghir), which haven’t received updates in several years.

Some of them are even recommended by the Snap Store in the games section.

Regarding the Snap app ares-emu, its repository on Github no longer exists, but ares-emu is publicly available instead of unlisted, still containing links that will direct users to the ares developers.

[Lin-Buo-Ren]

@syl21 Since you’ve decided not to continue maintaining this snap, could you please responsibly set the snap’s visibility to Private in the store’s backstage so that users won’t be confused by its existence and potentially bother the upstream project because of it?

Thanks in advance!