Investigate Snap packaging for Ubuntu 16.04.

[pchote]

Ubuntu 16.04 adds support for snap packages that can be uploaded to and distributed via the Ubuntu software center. This should, in principle, provide a much better install experience for people on the new Ubuntu.

I'm planning to investigate what we need to support this for our next release.

[pchote]

The snapcraft tool still looks to be very immature / limited. There doesn't seem to be a way (short of writing a custom build plugin) to run arbitrary scripts, patch our makefile, or otherwise run our custom install-* rules in a way that doesn't error out.

[Mailaender]

Might be worth trying the cross-distro https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/xdg-app/ instead.

[pchote]

My problem above was worked around by adding a custom makefile into our packaging dir. My understanding is that xdg-app is still a long way from being production ready, so it's probably not worth our time yet.

[probonopd]

Or cross-distro: http://appimage.org - many projects are already using it.

[xan2622]

Might be worth trying the cross-distro https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/xdg-app/ instead.

See also http://flatpak.org/

[pchote]

The main purpose of this ticket is to create a package that can be distributed via the ubuntu software center. All these other package formats don't really help there.

[pchote]

@diddledan has created https://github.com/diddledan/openra-snap which is available from https://snapcraft.io/openra and is automatically available through the Ubuntu Software Center.

[ghost]

The main purpose of this ticket is to create a package that can be distributed via the ubuntu software center.

On Ubuntu 18.04 I had to manually install gnome-software-plugin-snap so that OpenRA would show up in the search results of the software center. Similar projects like https://github.com/OpenTTD/OpenTTD however seem to be registered differently and are always displayed. It would be interesting to know if AppImages can be used with gnome-software, perhaps https://developer.gnome.org/gnome-software/3.24/plugins.html is a help.

[PunkPun]

is this still relevant?

[abcdefg30]

We have AppImages now.