poor naming conventions for scripts prepare and install
Affects | Status | Importance | Assigned to | Milestone | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
Snapcraft |
New
|
Undecided
|
Unassigned |
Bug Description
As a newbie to snapcraft and with still fairly sparse documentation and resources, I've found it fairly hard to build a snapcraft.yaml from scratch.
Some of the naming conventions haven't really helped as they are not particularly evocative of the intent.
In particular the plugin script 'install' seems to be rather badly named.
On looking at existing plugins I assumed that the install script was executed at the point in time that the snap was installed.
I now find that it is in fact called just after the build phase.
The doco does clear this point up but a good design should make intent clear.
From an outsiders perspective the name 'install' makes no sense.
The 'prepare' keyword is better, but hardly evocative. Exactly what is it preparing me for?
I'm also a great advocate of symmetry when developing.
The above problems and applying the law of symmetry suggests two obvious name changes
1) prepare - pre-build
2) install - post-build
By deprecating prepare and install and replacing them with 'pre-build' and 'post-build' we get two evocative names that clearly indicate their intent and we will save a lot of developers some pain and suffering from now to the end of time.
Regards,
Brett