Has sqlite3 been pulled from the snap store?

[Colin Watson]

On Thu, Jun 11, 2020 at 07:59:02PM -0500, Jim wrote:
> Running Mint 18.3 snap version is 3.11.0.

I'm guessing this means "sqlite3 version", rather than "snap version"?
Also, it's normally better to ask for Mint help on Mint
lists/forums/whatever rather than on Ubuntu lists.  But let's see what I
can do here.

> I want to look at a Mozilla-Firefox sqlite3 db. Version 3.11.0 says it
> cannot open it.

What's the exact error message?

(If it's "database is locked", then a simple workaround is to copy the
.sqlite file somewhere else before trying to open it, since otherwise
you may not be able to open it with sqlite3 while Firefox is running.)

> So I googled for the easiest way to update sqlite3.

My strong suspicion is that this is a false trail.  I'm not an SQLite
expert, but from a scan through https://sqlite.org/fileformat2.html the
last mention of a file format change I can find was at 3.8.1.  Without
further details of the error message, I'm not yet convinced that
updating sqlite3 would help.

> Found one that says use snaps.
> 
> So I went to the snap store and searched for sqlite3 got one hit for
> something called pharo.

This is a snap that happens to use sqlite3 and mention it in its
description, but not a way to get sqlite3 as such.

> Then I searched for sqlite and got 17 hits none of them were sqlite3,
> but 3 or 4 had sql in the name.
> 
> So tried googling sqlite3 snap. The link given was
> https://snapcraft.io/sqlite3-snap took me to the snap store and there was
> one called sqlite3-snap it was version 3.20.0, the latest is 3.32.3.
> 
> Switched to the firefox tab where I originally had gone to the snap store
> and searched for sqlite3-snap. Got no hits and was told to use a less
> specific search term.

"snap info sqlite3-snap" says:

channels:
  latest/stable:    –
  latest/candidate: –
  latest/beta:      3.20.0 2017-07-21 (1) 4MB devmode
  latest/edge:      3.20.0 2017-07-21 (1) 4MB devmode

So this is a snap that was last updated in 2017, and that's never been
promoted further than the beta channel.  I'd avoid it and look for other
options.

Before investigating any further ways to update sqlite3, I think it
would be a better plan to investigate the original error message
directly.

-- 
Colin Watson (he/him)                              [cjwatson at ubuntu.com]