Snappy Sprint - London June 2017

I recently attended a Snappy Sprint in London, UK. As well as the Canonical people attending (including me) with experience in the whole Snappy stack (Snapcraft, the Snap store, snapd, snapd-glib) we had great representation from the Elementary, Fedora, GNOME, MATE and KDE communities. My goal was to help improve the Snap experience for desktop apps both on Ubuntu and other distributions.

We spent a lot of time working on improving snap metadata for use with desktop apps. Improvements included:

• Exposing the title field from the store down to clients.
• A plan to get standard license information (using SPDX) attached to snaps.
• We made progress on a solution for projects that use AppStream to be able to easily build snaps and provide some AppStream data that doesn't fit the Snap metadata model to pass through to clients.
• Fixing of many small issues in GNOME Software so it is suitable to work in Fedora and other distributions.
• Plans for a tool that allows graphical configuration of snap interfaces.
• A plan to solve the limitation on desktop clients able to install / remove snaps without a store login.
• Discussions around metadata translations.

I helped the MATE Software Boutique and KDE Discover developers make use of snapd-glib using GIR bindings in Python and the Qt bindings to make their stores work. It was great to see snapd-glib working in these different use cases and got back some great feedback and a few patches.

Thanks to all the community for attending, I found it very productive to work in-person with them all. If you're interested in following Snappy development check out the Snapcraft Forum where you'll find discussions about what I've described above and much more.