Thoughts on stopping support for a snap for an non-supported version of Ubuntu

snap
1

Hi,

For our distro Ubuntu Budgie we have been supporting our classic distro-specific snap ubuntu-budgie-welcome for 18.04/20.04 and later.

Our agreed support arrangements for 18.04 ends this April (3 yrs support) and as such we no longer want the extra complexity to check newer versions of our classic snap works against this old flavour version nor release compatible versions of the snap for this old version.

We build ubuntu-budgie-welcome with core18 specifically for 18.04 support (32bit + 64bit). We would now like to move to core20 and thus 64bit only

Is there a recommended method to stop support for our snap - maybe removing the snap from the stable/ubuntu-18.04 track? I would rather not just let the snap “fester” with no more updates.

Should we just release one last version of the snap on the stable/ubuntu-18.04 track with a dialog displayed when the snap is run saying that “this flavour is now end-of-life - please upgrade to 20.04” ?

2

Already installed versions won’t be removed using this method.

Should we just release one last version of the snap on the stable/ubuntu-18.04 track with a dialog displayed when the snap is run saying that “this flavour is now end-of-life - please upgrade to 20.04” ?

I think this is the only way to ensure users don’t continue using an outdated version of your snap.

3 Likes
3

Interesting question and I’m thinking about it too. But to push an update with “This snap is no longer available” without giving any warnings seems like a bad idea. Another way could be (if this is possible) to make them install the snap from a beta-branch and take away the stable branch. So the users can still use the software but need to do a bit of work first.

Canonical might also take a bit of flak if applications stop working without warning since snaps are auto-updated.