We’ve had a few occasions recently where headline developers have wanted to share private snaps with their internal teams via the store, but we currently don’t cater well to this use case. Are there plans to add this functionality?
Typically the developer wishes to push their snap to the stable channel, but have a limited set of developers / users able to try the snap out. They want to see what the end-user experience is like, so snap install foo
and visibility of the snap in GNOME Software (for a limited audience) are important to them.
Some workarounds I’ve seen suggested, but which aren’t appropriate:-
Putting it in edge/beta/candidate as public snaps doesn’t work for them because they don’t want the public to stumble upon their well-known brand name snaps before they’re ready, and those channels aren’t exposed in GNOME Software.
Making their co-workers “collaborators” also isn’t desirable because this gives them far too many rights over the snap.
Uploading the snap under a different, obscure name won’t help because it’ll be publicly visible (in stable) and obviously give away the app before it’s ready.
Sharing the snap manually isn’t desirable because it doesn’t validate store assertions or the upgrade process.
What’s the plan of record to support these developers?