feature-request: craftctl set description

[rebornplusplus]

What needs to get done

It would be nice to have the ability to set description using craftctl. Per docs, setting only version and grade is supported currently.

Why it needs to get done

If your snap ships with only a specific binary, you can use one of the binary's help output to dynamically reflect in the description. Instead of changing the snapcraft.yaml everytime the help output changes, we can use this feature.

For example, for the chisel snap, we could utilise something like below:

parts:
  metadata:
    override-build: |
      # set snap description
      description="$(${CRAFT_STAGE}/bin/chisel help --all)"
      header="foo"
      footer="bar"
      printf -v description "$header\n\n$description\n\n$footer" 
      craftctl set description="$description"

[mr-cal]

Hi @rebornplusplus,

This is a good suggestion but we are hesistant to add support for this for a few reasons.

• We think it may be too niche as most application descriptions don't change often. We considered if this would be useful for getting a description out of a repo's README, but the parsing and potential for breaking the description if the README changes outweighs the convience of this.
• We're not convinced a command-line help output should be in a snap's description.