Who will run Snapcrafters?

Who will land PRs in https://github.com/snapcrafters project after @popey leaves Canonical ?

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.

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@om26er we’ve been discussing that. I don’t think it’s really tied to @popey and Canonical but more about organizing things for effective community collaboration. Stay tuned, we’ll be responding with further details soon!

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@kenvandine - Just a few thoughts… The wording in this thread implies that it’s possible for people to join to snapcrafters after certain qualifications are met but it doesn’t seem to be that way. So far, I’ve started to feel like people in a close link are able to do so.

I’ve tried to contribute snaps that I cared about as Ubuntu has been my daily driver and it’s 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 I’ve 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 doesn’t work.

Please also see the discussion around alacritty. We have notified Alan and other people just to get it adopted by snapcrafters and it’s been stalling for almost 4 months! And this is just to move the repo to snapcrafters’ 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 PR’s were merged or at least progressed after I personally sent messages to Alan. At least that’s been the case for gradle.

I hope that you’ll consider @om26er’s suggestion.

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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 isn’t any activity since then.

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It’s been 2 weeks since @kenvandine’s 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?

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It’s been 3 weeks since @om26er 's first post, 17 days since Ken’s 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 ‘Snapcrafters processs’ isn’t working and we’re 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 you’re describing is broken and painful. But I don’t think this is too long a delay for a fundamental change in the process. We’re working on building out a process to account for Popey’s 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 we’re going to have to make this a more standard, more community accessible thing.

The only reason it’s not already here is we need to make sure it’s 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, we’ll formalise how it works and lay everything out.

Here’s hoping gradle and alacrity are the last that will go through the current process. I’ll chase Igor to chase it through now.

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Sure thing! Count me in! :slight_smile:

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Can’t a machine do that job to avoid several manual validations?

This is definitely true!

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 you’re interested, let us know in the “snapcrafters reboot” topic!