Star developer request: ondra

[ondra]

I want to be reviewed as a Star Developer in the Snap store please.

I have been making snaps since the introduction of snap packages back in 2016.

I have been contributing to 50+ snaps, opensource as well as commercial ones. Some were in the mean time handed over to the upstream maintainers (wekan, openhab), some still being suported by me (znc-ondra.

Some of the snaps are key snaps used during snap development (toolbox) or image creations (uc-image, qdl).

My avahi snap is critical snap widely deployed on comercial and hobby systems.

I am also activelly maintaining other smart home snaps like homebridge.

My total install base for commercial and opensource snaps is currently around 25k.

I have been also activelly contributing the snapd opensource project, as well as supporting tools like snapcraft.

I try to keep my snaps up to date as has been doing for the past years.

[alexmurray]

+1 from me - @ondra is a superstar in the snap ecosystem and is well deserved of being recognised as a Star Developer IMO.

[jnsgruk]

Not that I’m a policy reviewer, but this seems like a no-brainer to me… Ondra is borderline legendary status in the Snap world

[popey]

@ondra is indeed a wonderful, skilled individual with many contributions, most of which people probably will never know about. +1 from me, despite not having any say in this.

---

But.

I am going to hijack this thread to raise an awkward point about this topic. Before I do that, I need to preface this as not an ‘attack’ on ondra at all. I’m raising it because I want the store content to improve, and I value the opinions, skills and experience of everyone in this thread, and beyond, and would like to figure out a path forward.

This sentence ‘triggered’ me.

I try to keep my snaps up to date as has been doing for the past years.

I do too. It can be hard keeping them all up to date, and even functional. I’m using more automation now, and set aside time each week to try and keep on top of this commitment, as is my responsibility.

Some time back I wrote a report which scanned all snaps in the public store, and showed huge numbers of snaps which were outdated. I privately shared it (to save blushes) with some ex-colleagues at Canonical. I have no knowledge if anything has happened since, but it doesn’t look like it from my perspective.

• Do these snaps contain unsupported versions of upstream software?
• Do they contain old versions of software which may also have security issues?
• Do they even still work?

There’s a lot of old stuff out there.

I do not accept “Just ping the publisher” as the right answer here. This does measurable reputational damage to the platform having cruft in it that nobody ‘cares’ about.

I modified my script to only report on one publisher and one architecture, and because ondra stood up, I pointed it at him - sorry. Also, very much not sorry, because this needs to improve across the board.

I am still +1 on @ondra getting a .

Note: There are almost certainly better ways to do this, and I am 100% sure some of these (like cm3-ondra) exist on other architectures, I just happened to run this on my x86 laptop. Also, conversely, some might be published in stable within the last day, but be old releases. It’s quite a minefield.

I think the store could do better at surfacing this kind of information. Like netdiscover-ondra is over 20 releases behind upstream. Shouldn’t it let users know?

Again, I have some outdated snaps in my “collection”, so, this isn’t a sleight on ondra. It’s a much, much wider issue.

I’d really like to start a conversation about this that results in actionable things that can go on someone’s todo list. I’m a dreamer, I know.

What can, and will we do about this? (and by ‘We’ I very much mean ‘You, with our help’)

---

review-old-snaps-by-publisher report: 2024.08.08.12.47 ondra

• Arch: x86_64
• Snaps published: 21

Application with no published releases (on x86_64)

• cm3-ondra
• pi3-ondra
• optee-test

Applications with no release in a stable channel

• java-jre-ondra
• libc-shm-shim

Applications with a recent release in the latest/stable channel

2024

• homebridge
• opengrok
• znc-ondra
• toolbox
• avahi
• znc-modules-ondra
• uc-image
• ondra-snap-ssh-debug
• qdl

2023

• avahi-client

2022

• opengrok-src-updater

2021

2020

• kura
• cntlm-ondra

2019

• kura-nn

2018

• fs-tools
• netdiscover-ondra

2017

2016