Snap package

[Ads20000]

Hey! I help out a bit with the Snappy people, I'm not a programmer just doing what I can to help them out, I notice you've got a snapcraft.yaml and an Edge Snap up, what's blocking this from being released to Stable?
I'm currently on 1mbps Internet so not really able to test at the moment...

• Promote a 4.3.0 build to Beta
• Promote a 4.3.0 build to Candidate
• Promote a 4.3.0 build to Stable
• Perhaps change the version identifier of the Edge build to 'Master' or '4.3.0+git' and build that straight from the Git repo, but the others should be built from the 4.3.0 release?

[MarshallOfSound]

This is more something for @RAOF to sort out 😆

I bumped the version in the yaml file and AFAIK the snap is supposed to build automatically

[RAOF]

Yup, https://dashboard.snapcraft.io/dev/snaps/7258/ is happily autobuilding.

[Ads20000]

@RAOF How well does the Snap work (like I said, I'm not really able to test at the moment), and if it works well maybe you could do a build of a released version (rather than from Git), test, and eventually put in the Stable branch? :)
At the moment people won't see it in software centres or even by searching for it from the command-line, since it's only in Edge.

[RAOF]

The snap works pretty much entirely; the icon is broken, and there are bugs/missing features in Unity that mean the tray icon and Sound Indicator don't quite work correctly, but under GNOME Shell it's flawless modulo the icon being broken.

Publishing 4.3.0 to a real channel might be sensible. :)

[Ads20000]

To fix the tray icon and sound indicator you may need a dbus interface, could you test this?
This is the one used in the corebird-diddledan snap (this goes after confinement and before apps):

slots:
  dbus-corebird:
    interface: dbus
    bus: session
    name: org.baedert.corebird

Presumably you'd want to call the slot dbus-google-play-music-desktop-player or something shorter(!) and you'd need a name too but I don't know what you'd put there. Perhaps you know more about dbus than I?

I had the same problems (not the icon one) with the Spotify Web Player for Linux Snap and sadly never resolved the issue before the Spotify Web Player for Linux project was abandoned. Martin Wimpress said something about 'mpris hooking' being needed but that may have been misleading and I can see you've got an mpris slot which might be that?

[RAOF]

There are two bugs here:

• For the sound indicator, the problem is that the sound indicator won't show anything it can't find a .desktop file for. As a snap, we can't install a desktop file anywhere it looks for; there's no workaround we can do for this. (Users can copy the .desktop file into a path the sound indicator looks for, though)
• For the application indicator, libappindicator needs to write the icon to a path that's not mangled by the snap confinement; it currently goes into /tmp, but that's actually a snap-local path that can't be sent over dbus.

[ogra1]

@RAOF have you checked the vlc snap ? it uses the mpris slot to hook into the sound indicator

[RAOF]

How does it work around the problem that indicator-sound will only display things it can find a desktop file for, and doesn't look in any of the snap paths? As I say, mpris itself works fine, and the various GNOME Shell mpris extensions will happily control it/get album art/etc. It's just indicator-sound that has an extra, unsatisfyable, constraint.

[ogra1]

i dont know how/if it finds the .desktop file in case of vlc, but i know it works on my 16.04 desktop (vlc has an entry with controls in the indicator menu once i started it from the snap), so there must be a way to make it work with snaps.

[Ads20000]

@RAOF Looking at VLC's snap the only particularly unusual thing I can see is their build process in which they use some commands to edit the prime of the Snap before packaging, seems like they're doing something with the icon which could fix the icon issue here? https://github.com/videolan/vlc/blob/master/extras/package/snap/package.mak

I'm not a programmer so I don't really understand what's going on, maybe you do.

[flexiondotorg]

@RAOF To fix the issue libappindicator not being able to write the icon export TMPDIR=$XDG_RUNTIME_DIR in the command:, something like this:

command: env TMPDIR=$XDG_RUNTIME_DIR PATH=/usr/local/bin:${PATH} ${SNAP}/bin/desktop-launch $SNAP/usr/share/example/Example

[Ads20000]

@RAOF Any updates on this? I can see there's still only a snap in the edge channel (though good to see that it's up-to-date!)