Official Snap Package

[merlijn-sebrechts]

Hi

I've recently worked on the SDLPoP snap package and I was wondering if you're interested in having the ownership transferred to you.

Snap packages are "universal" Linux installers that are supported on many Linux distributions such as Ubuntu, Fedora, Debian, Pop!_OS etc. It's a single package for all the distributions and all their versions. Compatibility is very high because snaps are sandboxed and contain all their dependencies in the sandbox.

Afaik, all the features of SDLPoP are currently supported in the snap, including joystick support, saves, custom SDLPoP.ini files, etc. There aren't any outstanding bugs known with the package and over the past year, SDLPoP was often featured in the "Editor's Picks" in the Ubuntu Software store, so it's quite popular.

This is a graph showing the distributions of active installs geographically and based on Linux distro.

Currently, this snap package is maintained by the "snapcrafters" community. We're happy to keep doing this, but one of the goals of snaps is to give developers control over the distribution of their apps on Linux, so it's common to ask the upstream developers if they're interested in taking ownership of the package.

Currently, the snap package is built from this repo, which gets the code from the latest release of SDLPoP from your repo. It's currently integrated with Travis to do automatic test-builds of pull requests and it's integrated with https://build.snapcraft.io so that every push to master triggers a new build in the edge channel. After testing, this package is manually promoted from the edge channel to the stable channel, at which point it's available for everyone on Linux and existing installations get updated automatically.

So, are you interested or do you have any questions? Let me know!

If you're interested, I can make a PR to add the snap bits to this repository, instead of it being in a separate repository. Then you'd get automatic builds of every push to the master branch of this repository, so people on Linux can easily test the bleeding edge version of SDLPoP.