The Snapcrafters need your help!

Hello community!

We, the Snapcrafters, need your help.

To give everyone just a bit of context, Snapcrafters is a team of community members and several Canonical employees dedicated to helping maintain a number of popular snaps that do not currently have upstream support. Since our reboot earlier this summer, we have seem a surge of activity in our team. We have more than doubled to 30+ members, and as part of our mission, we have defined and redefined clear procedures and policies for our work. We want to make sure that our work remains trusted and valued in the eyes of the community, and that we deliver a great experience to the end users.

We currently maintain about 90 different snaps. Each snap is supposed to have a maintainer - a person who will “own” the overall lifecycle if this snap, with the help and contribution from the rest of the team. Today, some of our snaps do not have a maintainer, which can slow down our update and release cycle.

We want to ask the wider snap community to step in and help us.

Below is the list of snaps without maintainers. If you are interested in taking on this role, or help in any other way, please reply to this thread. We will happily welcome you into our team, and add you to our GitHub team. Note that you do not need to be a snap expert before joining. If you use one of these snaps and/or are interested in some of them, we can help you get up to speed. The Snapcrafters community contains people of all skill levels and we’re used to helping each other out.

If you’re interested to help out, or if you have more questions, feel free to reply to this topic. Pro tip: if you’re deciding whether or not to ask a certain question, the answer is always “Yes, ask it!”.

Thanks,

Merlijn, on behalf of the Snapcrafters team

What does a maintainer do?

  • The most important job of a maintainer is to “bump” the version of the snap each time the upstream project releases a new version. This is often a very easy process, you just update the version number in the snapcraft.yaml file and update the checksum of the new installation file like so.
  • The second most important job of a maintainer is to respond to issues. This includes asking for more details, trying to reproduce the issue, and finding a fix. This second part is where you get the weight of the entire snapcrafters community behind you. If you get stuck, simply ask a question in our group chat and we’ll be here to help you.
  • The final, but also very important, job of a maintainer is to test new versions of the snap together with the community before releasing them, so that we’re sure nothing is secretly broken.

Which snaps need maintainers?

Atom
Axel
Brackets
Codium
Corsixth
Cumulonimbus
DDGR
DOSBox-X
Eclipse
fkill
get-iplayer
Gitter Desktop
googler
irssl
Jenkins
Mutt
OfflineIMAP
opentoonz
opentoonz-morevna
PyRadio
signal-desktop
Simple Note
slack-term
Spelunky
Sublime Merge
Teleconsole
term2048
wethr
Wire
Wordpress Desktop

Where do I find more information about Snapcrafters?

6 Likes

Would be glad to be of help

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Hi Roman, which of the listed snaps would you like to try helping us with?

Just to say thank you to all the snapcrafters, and in particular to @galgalesh for this leadership.

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Hi @galgalesh,

Can I be the maintainer of any of the following projects

  1. Eclipse
  2. Atom
  3. Brackets

I have used all of these IDEs in the past.

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I’ll take axel. I use it often (though not from snap).

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I wouldn’t bother with brackets. It’s dead/archived/abandoned upstream.

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For now I would like to start with

  • signal-desktop
  • wire

Thank you

@galgalesh I know this conversation is a little older, but I would like to become the maintainer for the Jenkins snap. Looks like it has not been updated since April 2021 so I would be will to help out with that.

One thing that I would need however is to have the Jenkins snap transferred to my name on the Snap Store so that I can handle builds, promotions, etc.

1 Like

Happy to help maintain a snap or 2

  • mutt – I used to use, and wouldn’t mind looking at it
  • gitter-desktop – another one I used to use, so wouldn’t mind having a look
  • slack-term – seems like an interesting project, hasn’t had upstream commits since 2020, so not much to do there, unless people have issues
2 Likes

Hey Arif

Feel free to bring mutt and slack-term back into shape! We’re accepting pull requests on GitHub. You can look at our repository for signal-desktop as the model-snap that shows how stuff should be done.

If you send me your matrix username, I can add you to our matrix channel to discuss this further!

My message is pretty old :). but that would be awesome, I’m at @arif-ali:ubuntu.com on Matrix, and would love to contribute more on snaps

1 Like