Looking to distribute a commercial package as a snap

[Michael Hall]

On 10/05/2016 10:34 PM, Spencer wrote:
> My entry into the snap world has been a tough one.  There is online documentation, but it is not kept up-to-date.  I get the feeling that the bar for entry is the need to be the kind of person who loves to learn everything about a system by becoming one of its developers.  For example, I couldn't figure out how to use the scons plugin until I dug into the python code for it.  Is it documented somewhere?  I don't know.
> 
> Anyhow, talking with someone on this mailing list, I learned a very useful thing: if you go down the snap road, you want to learn how to get the log information from you app when it's installed in strict mode.  I know of no other way to diagnose problems with your app exhibited in strict mode, but no where else.
> 
> Lastly, snaps, for now, once installed, can only be run from the command line.  There is no desktop integration, even though, oddly, a desktop file is required.  And I have no idea when or if an accepted snap will show up in the app directory.
> 

The .desktop file gets installed into
/var/lib/snapd/desktop/applications/ which should also have been added
to your XDG_DATA_DIRS environment variable. Most desktop shells should
pick it up based on that (it might need a restart it if you just
installed snapd on your distro).

Can you verify that you have .desktop files there and that
/var/lib/snapd/desktop is in your XDG_DATA_DIRS?

I have a number of them installed there and they show up in Unity's
dash, including your rubecube snap .

>> On Oct 5, 2016, at 2:26 PM, Paul Miller <stelefx at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> I work on a popular visual effects package that's been around for 10+ years. Unfortunately we have had to target specific, older Linux distributions to ensure maximum compatibility on various flavors of Linux, but I'm hoping packaging as a snap will avoid all this. I'm building on Kubuntu 16.04.
>>
>> The application links with a custom set of Qt 5.7 libs and has a bunch of resource files and plugins. It has a GUI binary but can also be run from the command-line using a symlink that kicks in a command-line only background renderer.
>>
>> Will packaging as a snap be a good fit for distributing my application, and are there any good examples out there that can maybe walk me through setting it up?
>>



Michael Hall
mhall119 at ubuntu.com