EDIT to change the example so that it includes a sideloaded (or in this case, try-mode) snap. This to me says if there’s anybody parsing this by hand they probably have bugs for sideloaded snaps.
While I’m here, I think I’ll change those empties to a - (as for Notes).
This is handy and means I won’t need to reach for ‘snap info’ nearly as much.
Considering the discussion in Ubuntu about ‘snaps in main’ where they want a snap to track a non-existent track until which point it needs to exist, what will the output of the above be in that case? Where the snap came from?
Up above you mentioned 1.10/candidate which suggests <track>/<channel> but here you said stable/ubuntu-18.04. Did you accidentally switch them or were you saying that stable/ubuntu-18.04 actually means “it’s tracking stable unless
ubuntu-18.04 exists”?
Maybe it doesn’t matter if the track doesn’t exist-- the column is ‘Tracking’ not ‘The track where the snap came from’. In that light, perhaps ‘ubuntu-18.04’ is all that should be expressed. The fact that ubuntu-18.04 is being tracked, but it doesn’t exist so falls back to ‘stable’ maybe isn’t interesting for this column?
Note that stable is the risk level; the track of the thing we usually call stable is latest (so the channel is latest/stable).
But yes, it’s the tracking channel; the “where it came from” is weird and probably confusing (two users on slightly different refresh windows tracking the same channel could see it “coming from” different channels).
On the other other hand (there’s something in the water I swear), it isn’t clear we want to list the branch in this at all (we don’t show branches in snap info); it’s a bit of an open question. We’ll see.
@chipaca Option (a) looks very nice, and bonus points for using the unicode character saving two positions. We don’t need to mention anything in Notes since it’s already explicit from the Tracking column.