I’ve recently installed the snap vscode from the store and noticed that it’s outdated. The snaps version is Version 1.23 but Version 1.24 has been released for quite some time.
Upon further inspection I’ve found an issue in the Snapcrafters Github repo related to this.
When I pulled the repo and build & installed the snap myself it installed version 1.24 just fine.
I’m new to snap development so I have a few questions:
Are these snaps automatically updated? Meaning, that if a new version of vscode is released, will the snap in the store update accordingly?
What happens if an author (who is not the original maintainer of the ‘snapped’ software) of a snap in the store becomes inactive?
We had an issue with the build system, and the original build setup of vscode wasn’t automated but it is now.
We’ve been testing 1.24 in the edge channel for a while and all seems fine, so I’ve pushed it to the stable channel. You should get an update imminently, or you can force a refresh with snap refresh
To answer your question, they’re semi-automatic. We’re working on making them more automated. The build service is automatic if the upstream source is a git repo, but when the snapcraft config means a snap is consuming a deb, tarball or some other random binary blob, it’s a little trickier. We’ve brainstormed a possible solution we’ll look at next week. In other words, we’re on it
If an author becomes inactive we try and reach out to them to get them to update, and in rare occasions if the snap is harmful we may request it’s unpublished, but I don’t believe that’s happened yet.
