this post was submitted on 12 Nov 2023
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You can; the issue is that you can't add two snap repositories at once.
This is functionally pretty much the same thing, as nobody is likely to want to use snap while locking themselves out of the main snap repository, but it's still important to make the distinction.
In theory I guess there's nothing stopping you setting up a mirror of the main snap repo with automatic package scraping, but nobody's really bothered exploring it seeing as no distro other than Ubuntu has taken any interest in running snap.
I know that it's possible to change the one entry but adding additional ones is not possible and that's by design.
Is that an artificial limitation that could be resolved by third-party clients?
It's all open source so there's no reason you couldn't fork it and add that functionality. Although it'd probably be a fairly involved piece of work; it wouldn't be a simple one-line change.
Who knows? Maybe it's just "#define STORES_LIMIT 1"?
It's not all open source. Canonical merely made available a super simple reference implementation of the Snap server but the actual Snap Store is proprietary.
I was referring to snapd, which is the thing that actually has the hard limit on a single repository. That's fully open source (and there's one major fork of it out in the wild, in the form of Ubuntu Touch's click). The tooling for creating snap packages is also all open source.
The APIs which snapd uses to interact with its repo are also open source. While there's no turnkey Snap Store code for cloning the existing website, it's pretty trivial to slap those APIs on a bog standard file server if you just want to host a repo.
Not open-sourcing the website code is a dick move, but there's nothing about the current set up that would act as an obstacle for anyone wanting to fork snap if that's what they wanted to do. It's just with flatpak existing, there's not a lot of point in doing so right now.