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Deprecate the snap build

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#973 17 comments 3 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

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Assessment

Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Newbie friendliness
20/100
Issue type
Feature
Clarity
Needs clarification
Activity status
Stale
Tech stack
go, shell
Domain
build-system, cli, release

Research direction

No files or tests are named. Review the current snap build and Linux installation flow, then clarify whether the intended scope is deprecation, a replacement installer, or both. Done should be defined by the maintainers, including the supported installation path and any required user-facing instructions.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

With quite some regularity there are issues reported with the snap build.

  • It prints instructions to use the opaque and absolute snap path to binary to execute commands. One should never run those directly
  • It creates config within the sandbox but searches for them in the user dir when trying to read them
  • It It sometimes doesn't seem to have permissions to create the users config in ~/.config

And there have been other weird things reported in the gitter where the student didn't create a bug report here.

No one of the maintainers of the CLI seems able to reproduce the issues, even when using snap on their own.

Therefore my conclusion of this issue is, that the snap-sandbox is also a blackbox for us that introduces unsolvable problems. Since the introduction of the snap, requests for help with installation problems have massively increased in gitter instead of getting less.

The majority of issues are because of snap weirdnesses, and solved by removing the snap replacing it by a manual installation.
Second is beeing confused about the unpack location in a manual installation.
Third is not having installed snap properly before trying to use it to install exercism

(This ranking is based on my personal perceiption and only includes linux derivations)

And even though I still do not like the idea of having a not-managed-by-the-package-manager-program on the computer, I realy think, that creating a simple shell script, which downloads the binary for the current platform, moves it to ~/bin and prints a message that one has to add export PATH=~/bin:"$PATH" to the ~/.bashrc or ~/.zshrc respectively or equivalent commands to equivalent files in any other shell would be the best thing to do.

Students then could install by a curl https://exercism.io/get-exercism | sh or similar.

Dominant language
Go
Stars
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Forks
363
Avg merge
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Merged PRs (30d)
1

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