This is not a rant, but this came out of frustration. I don’t know if this post will violate the rule of the forum. But, I guess @kenvandine and @SergioCostas will agree with what this post wants to convey. Recently, icon-library got updated to the tag 0.0.17, it’s a production level and professional software, mostly used by GTK based app developers. But, in this release this app uses libadwaita version 1.4.alpha, as the name suggests, this library is at its alpha stage. Still, they are using it in a professional and production level app.
This trend came to my knowledge from 2 new GNOME Core apps, Loupe and Snapshot. It’s understandable to use development/alpha/beta stage libraries with these apps, as these apps themselves aren’t complete yet.
But, later on, many GTK4 apps started to copy this, like:
Obfuscate [While transition to libadwaita 1.2 to 1.3]
And many more can be found practicing this. This practice breaks the update for the snap packages, cause these libraries can’t be built from source most of the time/difficult to do so.
I would like to have other snapcrafters give their opinion on this.
Thanks, Soumyadeep Ghosh