I respect your decision and honest feedback. I will not be trying to appeal it.
I’m still debating whether to apply again in the future. I’m leaning towards not. Perhaps I’ll feel differently down the road, but for now I feel that star developer status doesn’t apply to me or my snap. Let me explain:
Why it might not apply to me
I understand I’ve missed the mark on the community support criteria. I occasionally pop into the forums to share something I’ve learned, correct some documentation, contribute to base snap testing. My forum stats seem respectable at first: 134 days visited, 1.3k posts read, and 22 posts created. Not a stranger, but nowhere near Lucy or Alex. They are beasts and practical or literal moderators. I have a lot of respect for them, but I don’t have the capacity to be unpaid support staff or moderator.
Its been difficult enough dedicating my time to the unpaid, often unnoticed, open-source development work. I’ve spent years worth of my spare time after working a full time job and pulling second shift at home. Usually staying up until the late hours of the night, long after my wife has fallen asleep. I’ve literally put my health into this like it was a horcrux. I’m not saying this for pity, I’m trying to paint a picture of what I’ve given it and how little I have left to give. I still maintain some level of life balance, and I’ve gotten a bit better at it, but this is without a doubt my passion project and development is my hobby. I’m biased toward dedicating myself to the project and less to community outreach.
Why it might not apply to my snap
At the time of applying my snap only had 2 revisions across 1 version. Clearly not meeting the criteria. This was somewhat deceptive, though, because I had to create a fresh snap because my old snap could not be renamed to the current one. The old snap had 8 revisions across 3 versions. So it actually had closer to 10 revisions across 4 versions. This still probably doesn’t meet criteria.
So why is the number so low?
- I actively try to limit publishing the snap, and try to batch updates. No seriously, this snap is a wifi router in a package. Its amazing that snaps auto update. Consumer routers usually don’t ever get updated, but mine auto updates. However, every update has to stop the old services/daemons and start the new ones, so that means the internet connection on connected devices drops temporarily. Not something I imagine my end users like much (although I’ve never received a complaint).
- There is a significant amount of invisible work not reflected in the releases.
- It would be easier if I only packaged other people’s open source projects in the snap (such as hostapd/dnscrypt), but I also develop my own for use in the snap to improve the security/performance. You can see the entire suite of related projects
- I rebranded (under a common “black cat” theme), moved all projects to an open code forge (codeberg), significantly updated documentation, maintained several documentation websites and tor onion services then eventually unified them, built an ubuntu core custom image with the snap bundled, taught myself more of the rust programming language, etc.
By far the largest gap between releases was due to developing and verifying the quality of the toe-beans dhcpv4 server to replace dnsmasq. But I think that shows my dedication to quality, and how I’m not afraid to climb mountains for this project. I want my users to have highly correct and memory safe software, and I’m willing to play the long game to make sure that its ready before deploying it to them.
Ironically, I’ve since published the snap twice. I was laid off from my job in April (allegedly due to AI/outsourcing) and between interviews I’ve had more time to develop. The last 2 releases focus on hardening memory safety, updating dependencies, and tightening the software supply chain a bit; something I felt was worth the immediate releases. They reflect only a week worth of work, which is relatively small for what I normally release.
What Star Developer Status meant to me
I’ve gone out of my way to make my snap trustworthy. I think the snapcraft.yaml file does a good job of reflecting this. You can see I’m doing things like assigning minimal permissions to separate daemons, building software from source (reproducibly), and verifying it. But most users never see or understand this. We need another way. I think Star Developer Status is a step towards that user trust.
I use snaps, flatpak, apt, appimage, cargo, nix packages, etc. That being said, the most appealing aspect of flathub is that each package has an easy-to-understand safety score and a popup explaining why. When I’m debating installing a package that should absolutely not have an internet connection it helps to see whether the safety score says it does. I think this is a second part to user trust.
…so, anywho, this message is way too long now. I hope the feedback was useful.
No hard feelings, Have a fantastic weekend, Jon
