snap/hamster question

[Keith]

On 1/30/23 6:16 AM, Karl Auer wrote:
> On Mon, 2023-01-30 at 12:37 +0100, Oliver Grawert wrote:
>> the magic runes to hack a snap are:
> 
> Thanks for that info, Oliver. It's just not a solution to have to
> shadow mount files and directories on every restart.
> 
> Creating my own snap, then doing it again when new snap versions come
> out, OR working out how to install the program from source, seems the
> only solutions. New versions do not seem to appear very often, though.
> 
> Maybe I should just live with the program as it is :-)
> 
> Regards, K.
> 

I think you can just unpack the current snap, modify the file you want, 
repack it, and then install it locally. You mentioned in your first post 
that you've performed a similar task with deb packages, so its basically 
the same effort. Learning to roll your own snap with snapcraft would be 
valuable knowledge in its own right, but upstream has dropped support 
for snaps (I guess because of a gnome-shell extension that's included 
now?), so you'd be on your own to debug any issues. They do offer a 
flatpak version, but looking at the issues list, it has quite a few 
problems even running under with flatpak's looser confinement restrictions.

Apparently, hamster has been at version 3.02 for a few years now, and 
that version is in the universe repo. So I have to ask, what's wrong 
with the deb packaged version?

If you do decide to try the repacking snap route, make sure you work on 
a copy of the snap since the hamster snap no longer appears in the snap 
store. You won't be able to download from the store to reinstall if the 
repacked version doesn't work. /var/lib/snapd/snaps is where you will 
find your installed snap packages.

-- 
Keith