No easy way to see what has changed on your system from /var/log (changes purged too early)

[James Troup]

It's not very easy to see what snaps have changed and when. dpkg
provides /var/log/dpkg.log and apt provides
/var/log/apt/{term,history}.log which combine to perform a very clear
picture of what packages were updated/installed on your system and
(for the most part) why.

By comparison 'snap changes' just tells me this:

186 Done 2016-11-15T03:44:32Z 2016-11-15T03:44:32Z Refresh all snaps in the system

Which isn't super helpful. I can dig into each change with 'snap
change $ID' but most of them are empty (presumably nothing to
refresh?).

Most problematic is that it seems to only store a certain amount of
changes with a pretty short horizon (~3 days).

[Mark Shuttleworth (sabdfl)]

I can confirm this.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[Michael Vogt (mvo)]

This is slightly better with snapd 2.18, it will show in snap changes:
"""
893 Done 2016-12-05T11:44:30Z 2016-12-05T11:45:09Z Refresh snaps "ubuntu-core", "foo"
894 Done 2016-12-05T11:44:30Z 2016-12-05T11:45:09Z Refresh snap "ubuntu-core"
895 Done 2016-12-05T11:46:23Z 2016-12-05T11:46:23Z Refresh all snaps: no updates
"""
However the changes are still purged after a couple of days and not logged to a file in /var/log for easy "grep".