I think this is now the time to put a bit more trust into the Ubuntu community and allow us write access to repositories under that project and potentially also permissions on the Snap store for packages uploaded by Snapcrafters (classic confined snaps really).
The Ubuntu community already has core developers that are able to upload deb packages to the archives, so a similar treatment needs to be done with the Snapcrafters project as well. There could of course be a criteria on who qualifies for that.
@om26er weâve been discussing that. I donât think itâs really tied to @popey and Canonical but more about organizing things for effective community collaboration. Stay tuned, weâll be responding with further details soon!
@kenvandine - Just a few thoughts⊠The wording in this thread implies that itâs possible for people to join to snapcrafters after certain qualifications are met but it doesnât seem to be that way. So far, Iâve started to feel like people in a close link are able to do so.
Iâve tried to contribute snaps that I cared about as Ubuntu has been my daily driver and itâs really important for me to have certain packages available as snaps. 2 of those snaps were:
gradle
alacritty
However the process of getting an approval for classic snaps, getting a snap to be managed by snapcrafters and merging a PR in that repo has been painfully slow and very frustrating in my experience.
It took almost 2 months to have gradle published on the snap store. Every update PR Iâve sent for it required me to ping Alan, Igor and several other individual which is really annoying not just for me but also for them. Another PR is waiting just to be noticed and probably will require me to ping everyone again. This process simply doesnât work.
Please also see the discussion around alacritty. We have notified Alan and other people just to get it adopted by snapcrafters and itâs been stalling for almost 4 months! And this is just to move the repo to snapcraftersâ repo. What will happen then when we need updates, fixes etc?
You say that the process is not tied to @popey but it really is. All my PRâs were merged or at least progressed after I personally sent messages to Alan. At least thatâs been the case for gradle.
I hope that youâll consider @om26erâs suggestion.
In one Snapcraft Clinic session, I asked about gaining write access to one of the snapcrafters-adopted repositories (snapcrafters/nano to be specific) and got a reply that only the fellows in Canonical are qualified for such access (probably more because that snap is under classic confinement, though).
For collaborative maintenance, I previously proposed Snap Dump: An experiment of maintaining snaps, together, as an organization which is meant to gather people interested to co-maintain a pool of snaps to improve snap quality / host snaps that are not high profile enough to be adopted by the Snapcrafters organization. Unfortunately there isnât any activity since then.
Itâs been 2 weeks since @kenvandineâs reply. 6 days since my follow-up comment on alacritty. 12 days since my PR is created to update gradle to its latest stable version.
How long will it take to conclude with a decision that will make this process work?
Gradle snap users cannot get an update. Alacritty users need to compile from source. Can we please at least move forward with these 2 snaps?
Itâs been 3 weeks since @om26er 's first post, 17 days since Kenâs reply,12 days since @tunix followed up on alacritty and 15 days since @tunix 's PR was created to update gradle to its latest stable version.
This is a problem that needs and is being addressed, we recognise the current âSnapcrafters processsâ isnât working and weâre going to fix it. But we are going to need help from the community.
This is too long a delay for a PR on snaps that people are relying on, for sure, and the process youâre describing is broken and painful. But I donât think this is too long a delay for a fundamental change in the process. Weâre working on building out a process to account for Popeyâs leaving and to improve how this is done.
A plan that will be posted here in the next couple of weeks for feedback, a plan that I hope you (@tunix and @Lin-Buo-Ren and @om26er ) will contribute to and become a part of because weâre going to have to make this a more standard, more community accessible thing.
The only reason itâs not already here is we need to make sure itâs something the engineering team can do and not something we have to backtrack on in a few weeks time.
Again that feels like a long time, because it is, but upon completion of a proper plan, weâll formalise how it works and lay everything out.
Hereâs hoping gradle and alacrity are the last that will go through the current process. Iâll chase Igor to chase it through now.
We rebooted the Snapcrafters initiative. For more information and instructions on how to join, see Snapcrafters Reboot
We can definitely use more help setting up automated tooling for testing and validation. If youâre interested, let us know in the âsnapcrafters rebootâ topic!
