Comment 40 for bug 1575053

Revision history for this message
Gustavo Niemeyer (niemeyer) wrote : Re: Please move snap user data from "$HOME/snap" to "$HOME/.snap" (or to "$HOME/.local/share/snap" in accordance with the XDG spec)

This is the second hottest bug because it's very easy to have an opinion about it without any strings attached.

As I believe was explained multiple times above the real reason this is not "hidden" is that snap/ is not just a configuration directory. This is where the writable space for all snaps live. For them to be able to write anywhere else they need interfaces that would allow them to do so.

As a trivial example, this is content I have in my snap/ directory right now:

$ ls ~/snap/telegram-desktop/current/Downloads/*
VID-20180204-WA0007.mp4 VID-20180214-WA0008.mp4

Hiding this directory has an important unintended consequence which I'm sure you won't like either: it encourages packagers to use less strict confinement. For that specific reason, we won't change that just yet.

Instead, we're working on better ways to allow snaps to have access to read and write data in the system in a controlled way. After that happens, we WILL remove this directory from your homes into a better place.

Meanwhile, apologies for the inconvenience.