Replacing the telegram-desktop deb by a snap installer in stable series?

[Sebastien Bacher]

Hey there,

In Lunar we changed the telegram-desktop deb to be 'a snap installer', 
which was done on upstream request. The telegram-desktop snap is 
maintained by upstream.

Now we are considering doing the same in stable series, I would like to 
get some input on the topic (probably from the SRU team?).

The initial request has been registered on 
https://launchpad.net/bugs/2000552, copying the rational

'
 > This package is not maintained by the upstream project maintainers 
and it gets lots of reports about crashes and bugs. I would like to 
suggest a transition to a snap installer so that installing
 > this package would automatically install official snap package of 
Telegram Desktop:

 > https://snapcraft.io/telegram-desktop

 > Like it was done for Firefox, Chromium.

 > That way the upstream maintainers could take care of the users of 
this package. Thank you.'


We also have issues because the outdated client doesn't handle well 
newer server side features, for example https://launchpad.net/bugs/1998127

 > The old version of telegram installed via apt does not display 
messages containing characters added in newer versions.


We have a few options there

1. Fixing the deb in older series, either by updating the version or 
backporting changes. That's complicated though since new versions also 
have new requirements. We also don't have resources to allocate to those 
updates nor seen contributors interested in helping.

2. Empty the deb and recommend users to install the software from 
upstream directly.

3. Replace the deb by a snap installer.

We believe that 3. is the best solution for us and our users.


How would the SRU team feel about going that way?

Cheers,
Sebastien Bacher