Problems trying to create a snap package for bioinformatics tools

[Gustavo Niemeyer]

Hi Gordon,

On Mon, Oct 24, 2016 at 12:13 PM, Gordon Ball <gordon at chronitis.net> wrote:
>
>  * The package contains multiple binaries, and the links in /snap/bin
> are named, eg `cufflinks.cuffdiff`, which makes them incompatible with
> existing scripts.


As you can imagine the problem here is namespacing. Unlike in traditional
Linux distributions, the application names inside snaps are not curated to
prevent conflicts, so the naming scheme we have put in place allows
everybody to own the namespace under their own snaps with that scheme.

That said, we understand this is not optimal because, as you say, it breaks
existing scripts. We have two alternative plans for how to sort this out,
and will put one of them in place very soon.

Additionally, I can't declare `apps:` keys with
> underscores in them, so some come out completely misnamed.
>

This is related but slightly orthogonal. We indeed restrict the charset
used to name commands, both to enable predictable delimiters in some
contexts, and also to make the system feel saner to the user. The vast
majority of application names fit in the current constraints, so the
question is whether it's best to have a consistent naming scheme for the
user, or whether it's best to attempt to support more cases for the
developer (underscores, uppercases, dots, ...). We don't have an answer yet.


gustavo @ http://niemeyer.net
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