Setting snap categories - does this override snapcraft.yaml metadata?

I’m trying to set categories for my published snaps (sx-client and sx-server) through the snap store web interface, but I’m getting the following warning message:

“Making these changes means that the snap will no longer use the data from snapcraft.yaml.”

Current situation:

  • My snaps are published and using metadata from snapcraft.yaml
  • I want to set categories (Utilities + Server and Cloud) through the web interface

Questions:

  1. Should categories be settable through the web interface without overriding snapcraft.yaml data?

  2. Is there a way to specify categories in snapcraft.yaml itself, or must they be set through the web interface?

  3. If I set categories through the web interface, will it really stop using my snapcraft.yaml for other fields like description, license, etc.?

I’ve already added license, website, source-code, and issues fields to my snapcraft.yaml files, so I’d prefer to keep using the yaml for metadata control if possible.

Any guidance on the intended workflow for categories would be appreciated!

1 Like

I just hit the same problem. There was a recent issue raised at allow defining categories in snapcraft.yaml · Issue #5560 · canonical/snapcraft · GitHub, but it was suggested that this should be discussed here on the forum.

Personally, I agree that it would be great if the category field and any other one which is not provided by snapcraft.yaml were able to be customized in the snapcraft.io web UI without overriding the other metadata from snapcraft.yaml.

Perhaps store metadata and snap metadata need to be distinct in some way, on the store side? Otherwise, I think snapcraft would need to support a category field and do some validation that the value is one of the officially-supported categories.