environment variable setting issue

I'm using the new environment variable settings (bug1583259) from snapcraft 2.27 and noticed a couple of surprising things.

My snapcraft.yaml contained the following:

environment:
  APPORT_CRASHDB_CONF: $SNAP/lib/python3.5/site-packages/etc/apport/crashdb.conf

Then running apport-cli produced the following Traceback:

brian-murray@localhost:~$ /snap/bin/apport.apport-cli --help
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/snap/apport/x7/bin/apport-cli", line 369, in <module>
    app = CLIUserInterface()
  File "/snap/apport/x7/bin/apport-cli", line 127, in __init__
    apport.ui.UserInterface.__init__(self)
  File "/snap/apport/x7/lib/python3.5/site-packages/apport/ui.py", line 187, in __init__
    self.crashdb = apport.crashdb.get_crashdb(None)
  File "/snap/apport/x7/lib/python3.5/site-packages/apport/crashdb.py", line 822, in get_crashdb
    with open(conf) as f:
FileNotFoundError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory: '$SNAP/lib/python3.5/site-packages/etc/apport/crashdb.conf\n'

Two things about this were surprising to me.

1) The addition of "\n" to the environment variable. On a classic Ubuntu system using 'APPORT_CRASHDB_CONF=$SOMETHING apport-cli --help' doesn't pass along a carriage return.

2) The fact that "$SNAP" wasn't expanded in the environment. Again on a classic Ubuntu system if I use the following 'PLACE=/home/bdmurray APPORT_CRASHDB_CONF=$PLACE/source-trees/apport/trunk/etc/apport/blah apport-cli --help' APPORT_CRASHDB_CONF expands $PLACE so the traceback looks like this:

"FileNotFoundError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory: '/home/bdmurray/source-trees/apport/trunk/etc/apport/blah'"