'dpkg-query --showformat' equivalent for snap

[Eric Desrochers]

[WHISHLIST]

While investigating how we can integrate snap detection in sosreport as a packagemanager just like 'rpm' and 'deb' package does when using "packages = (<PKG_NAME>,) to detect the presence of the package (if installed) in a sosreport plugin.

I notice there is no easy way to query all installed snaps and have it into a 'dpkg-query' output equivalent, unless doing a 'snap list' along with some 'awk', 'grep', 'sed' and family.

That would be helpful to be able to have a 'dpkg-query --showformat' equivalent for snap if possible.

# man dpkg-query
......
     -f, --showformat=format
              This option is used to specify the format of the output --show will produce. The format is a string that will be output for each package listed.

              In the format string, “\” introduces escapes:

                  \n newline
                  \r carriage return
                  \t tab
......

According to sosreport official documentation :
https://github.com/sosreport/sos/wiki/How-to-Write-a-Policy

The expected output from sosreport packagemanager is :
package name|major.minor.bugfix version\n....

The output was based on what the following command offers and still in use as of today in sosreport :
# dpkg-query -W -f='${Package}|${Version}\\n' # debian
# rpm -qa --queryformat "%{NAME}|%{VERSION}|%{RELEASE}\\n"

[Eric Desrochers (slashd)]

I talked to mvo about that this morning, and he said, he might be able to work on this on his spare time as it look trivial to add this feature according to him.

[Michael Vogt (mvo)]

This is being worked on in https://github.com/snapcore/snapd/pull/5234

[Michael Vogt (mvo)]

I discussed this with Gustavo on the standup today. It seems like he prefers to not add a new feature but just use "snap list | awk '{print $1"|"$2}'|tail +2". Would that work for you? Or do you needs bits that are not visible via "snap list"?

[Eric Desrochers (slashd)]

As long as "snap list" output remain the same and have no intention to change the output in the future, I guess it should be fine, I've been testing "sosreport" expected output with a similar command.

The intent of this bug was to have a more fancy way to do it, but again I'm fine with manipulating "snap list" with awk, tail and family, if this wishlist is not in the snap scope.

[Zygmunt Krynicki (zyga)]

The referenced pull request was closed without being merged into snapd. I'm not sure that there's anyone working on resurrecting it so I'm marking this as confirmed. Mvo, please feel free to remove yourself from the assignee field if you don't plan on working on implementing this.