snap package prints erroneous token config instructions

[bradleybossard]

I haven't used exercism for a while, but upon deciding to revisit after a hiatus, I was pleased to find there is now a snap package available. Following the instructions at

https://exercism.io/cli-walkthrough

> sudo snap install exercism

and then, admittedly, not completely following all the instructions, I jumped to trying to install an exercise, and got the following error message

> exercism download --exercise=hello-world --track=typescript
Error:

    Welcome to Exercism!

    To get started, you need to configure the tool with your API token.
    Find your token at

        https://exercism.io/my/settings

    Then run the configure command:

        /snap/exercism/5/exercism configure --token=YOUR_TOKEN

In copying the instructions and replacing with my token

/snap/exercism/5/exercism configure --token=<my_token>

and getting a positive confirmation message that it had worked correctly, I tried re-downloading the exercise

> exercism download --exercise=hello-world --track=typescript

only to receive the same error message. After a minor amount of debugging to determine the path of the actual exercism binary

> which exercism
/snap/bin/exercism

and using the updated path when running configure

/snap/bin/exercism configure --token=<my_token>

it worked. Ultimately, I stumbled upon the correct instruction on the third page of

https://exercism.io/cli-walkthrough

exercism configure --token=<my_token>

But it seems like the command

> exercism download --exercise=<exercise-name> --track=<language>

should output this instead of the /snap/exercism/5/exercism path.

I realize I probably should have RTFM and I don't know enough about snaps to know how hard it is to fix, but seems like a reasonable fix given it's a beginner tool and the much appreciated effort for creating the snap.

[ric2b]

I'm not familiar with go but it sounds like that's coming straight from the program's first argument:

https://github.com/exercism/cli/blob/f2323bb2a63be5d79250932a7577baf8efef9302/cmd/root.go#L45

It's later used to format this string:

https://github.com/exercism/cli/blob/374a5704e2dfe09b2cd5ae5a19c5e9c2a316617d/cmd/cmd.go#L28-L39

So this might not be an easy fix, if it's tied to how snap calls the executable.

[kotp]

@NobbZ Probably related to many of the snap related installation support questions we get on Gitter.

[NobbZ]

Yes. This is exactly the same issue.

And as I personally refuse to use snap (and it is also not available for my OS) I can't get into it, but I think that these problems are caused by snaps sandboxing model and inidirections.

I think we need to reconsider the complete process of discovering and reading the configuration to make it suitable to snap.

[NobbZ]

It seems as if we see more and more users struck by this problem in the gitter.

While it have been one or two in a month at the beginning, we now see them multiple times a week.

We really need to find why this is an issue and fix it, or deprecated the snap build.

[NobbZ]

My assumption is, that something in the snap wrapper touches the environment and changes XDG_* variables, but does so in a non-reliable way.

Or if it happens reliable, then the exercism binary does not consistently use those variables to resolve location of the config file.