The Tesseract OCR snap's maintainance could be improved

[Lin-Buo-Ren]

There are several problems I noticed while reviewing the Tesseract OCR snap currently published by @elopio:

• Version out of date: The version shipped in the store appeared to be a development snapshot build from 2020/12/24, while the upstream’s latest release is from 2022/12/22, nearly 2 years of updates to catch on
• Unreleased version: The published version appears to be an alpha build, which is not desirable for regular usage, no stable releases are published yet in the stable channel
• Lacking proper channels to report problems: There are no support links at the snap’s store listing page, as the upstream doesn’t provide third-party Tesseract OCR distribution support it may bother them if the users contact them instead for snap support
• License wrongly set: The license set on the snap’s store listing page is Proprietary, while the upstream declares Apache 2.0

As a frequent but indirect user of Tesseract, I would like to improve this situation. I’m not a snap publisher that maintains snaps well either so I can’t guarantee any commitment, though, but here are some thoughts on what may be done to progress this issue further in the better direction:

• Build and publish stable releases of Tesseract OCR directly from the original publisher(@elopio), and fix the store listing page metadata

  I am willing to become snap’s contributor if that would help.

• Convince the upstream to adopt the snap and directly publish releases from them. (The Snapcraft recipe is already upstreamed but I doubt they are into maintaining it, though, but who knows?)

• Transfer the snap to the Snapcrafters organization to be maintained by the community

• Transfer the snap to me to publish stable releases and fix the store metadata (as mentioned above I’m not able to promise commitment in the maintenance, but it’s still better than the current situation)

Comments and help are appreciated.

References

• Please disregard the request to take over the tesseract snap name - store - snapcraft.io
• tessesract hasn’t been released to the ubuntu store · Issue #938 · tesseract-ocr/tesseract

[Lin-Buo-Ren]

As a start I managed to make the snap buildable against Snapcraft 7.3:

fix: Fix snap package building

As the recipe is already upstreamed I’m not sure how to publish from it without transferring the snap to the upstream(which they clearly not interested in taking).

Maybe contribute the GitHub Action with our publish credentials will do?

[Lin-Buo-Ren]

To make further progress, I’ve messaged @elopio about this discussion:

Hello, I would like to inform you about the discussion regarding the Tesseract OCR snap you have published:

The Tesseract OCR snap's maintainance could be improved

and would like to have your input to progress forward.

Best regards,
林博仁(Buo-ren, Lin)
Buo.Ren.Lin@gmail.com

If no responses were received in 1 month I’ll initiate a transfer request to transfer the snap under my namespace(or to the Snapcrafters if the application met the inclusion criteria).