[olivercalder]

Summary

Publish the pre-release .snap artifact to the latest/beta channel of the openshell snap package on the Snap Store.

Related Issue

Closes #4869

Changes

• Publish the pre-release .snap artifact built in CI to the latest/beta channel
• Let OPENSHELL_VERSION=pre install.sh select the snap package from latest/beta rather than falling back to the .deb/.rpm
• Adjust the version comparison checks for snap uploads to account for the potential -pre.X in versions
• Update related documentation

Release Notes

Testing

• Checks appropriate to the affected code and behavior pass
• Unit tests added/updated (if applicable)
• E2E tests added/updated (if applicable)

Checklist

• Follows Conventional Commits
• Commits are signed off (DCO)
• Architecture docs updated (if applicable)

[copy-pr-bot]

This pull request requires additional validation before any workflows can run on NVIDIA's runners.

Pull request vetters can view their responsibilities here.

Contributors can view more details about this message here.

[SDAChess]

The existing latest-version guard covers most out-of-order publication cases. There’s still a narrow window where an older run passes the check, then finishes uploading after a newer prerelease has published. We could close that by adding concurrency to jobs.publish in snap-publish.yml, grouped by channel and architecture:

concurrency:
  group: snap-publish-${{ inputs.upload-channel }}-${{ matrix.arch }}
  cancel-in-progress: false
  queue: max

The guard would then run after acquiring the publication slot. I’d treat this as a follow-up rather than a blocker.

The packaging test failure does need fixing. I ran bash tasks/scripts/test-packaging-assets.sh: it passes on the base but fails on this branch at the new assertion on line 222. That assertion expects:

component_args+=(--component "${component_name}=${comp}")

However, snap-publish.yml still contains:

component_args+=(--component "$comp")

It looks like the corresponding publisher change was omitted from the PR. Adding the component-name mapping would satisfy the assertion and match Snapcraft’s documented name=filename format.

[olivercalder]

Fixed both points, thanks @SDAChess

[SDAChess]

/ok-to-test d6861c9