Branches are an under-used but important feature of the Snap Store publishing capabilities. Indeed as I’m writing this post, I’ve never had a need to use the feature, and I’ve been publishing snaps for four and a half years. Let’s fix that!
Start with acorns
The rationale for branches is simple. Each snap in the Snap Store has a default track called ‘latest’ in which there are four channels named ‘stable’, ‘beta’, ‘candidate’ and ‘edge’. These are all typical buckets in which snaps are published for an extended period, perhaps months or maybe even years. Branches on the other hand are short-lived silos for publishing snaps.
As a developer you may have a published application which has bugs users experience but you cannot reproduce. A temporary branch can be used to hold a test build of the application you’re working on to solve a bug.
If you’re tracking and fixing multiple bugs in parallel, each can have their own separate branch under the same…