A few years ago I build an Arduino snap and have only updated it a couple of times since then to use new releases of Arduino. I offered the snapcraft configuration to the upstream Arduino project, but they declined citing the fact that they don’t provide any distro packaging at all.
Since I’ve not been able to keep up with upstream releasing, I’m looking for somebody who can take over this snap and potentially hook it into the snapcraft.io build service to provide regular updates to users.
Hey @mhall119 - It’s unfortunate the snap is namespaced and has a significant number of active installs. I don’t believe anyone else can take on something that’s namespaced under “your” account, unless you offered collaboration access to someone and kept the name. I’m not a massive fan of having namespaced snaps, but would much prefer them to have “genuine” names. I realise you made the snap some time ago, and back then it seemed reasonable to do.
So really I’m not sure what we do here. Should snapcrafters take it on perhaps, and use the ‘arduino’ name as a brand new snap? Perhaps you/we could push a new version of ‘your’ snap which pops up a zenity dialog telling people it’s no longer maintained and they should ‘snap install arduino’ (once it exists). Sadly the store doesn’t support renaming, so we can’t just s/arduino-mhall/arduino/g.
Suggestions on the best way forward most welcome!
Agreed about the namespacing, at the time I was hoping that upstream would adopt the snapcraft.yaml I wrote and release their own un-namespaced package. I never expected to get 12,000+ installs of this one 
Are you sure the store doesn’t support renaming? I thought this was something that was already possible.
Yeah, it’s possible to transfer a snap from one person to another, but renames are something we’ve asked about a few times, but it’s not currently possible. Perhaps @roadmr may have some ideas on what we can do here. This situation keeps coming up and we don’t have a good solution for it.
While the requirement to rename snaps was anticipated from the beginning and the snap-declaration assertion has some provisions to model (verb, not noun) snap name changes while maintaining the snap-id (which is the key we operate on) immutable, in practice most of the parts to allow that to happen in all the involved components (store, snapd, snapcraft) haven’t yet been planned or developed.
So currently the best course of action I can propose is:
Unfortunately, since they are different snaps, data can’t be migrated automatically (I think?), so #3 should also provide data migration instructions.
For future reference; the new snap is available under the arduino name and the arduino-mhall119 snap shows a warning message and asks to upgrade to the new snap. People are slowly switching and the new snap now has more active installs (~11.000) than the old one (~9.000).
