Classic snaps failing on Ubuntu 17.10

[jamesh]

I think @sergiusens is actually referring to this topic:

Not exporting `LD_LIBRARY_PATH` in desktop helpers when using classic confinement

So the use case here is that a classic confined app wants to execute programs from outside the snap. In the VS Code case, this would include: executing the system compiler toolchain and other build tools executing/debugging the app the user is building And you want to avoid passing on any environment that alters the execution of these subprocesses. Just looking through what the desktop-launch script does, LD_LIBRARY_PATH is just the start. Among other things it will also: set GST_PLUGIN_…

Note that it isn’t as simple as “not using desktop-launch” though. That will prevent LD_LIBRARY_PATH from being altered, but it is likely that many of the libraries desktop apps use will start searching for their plugins from the host system rather than those shipped with the snap.

I don’t have a good answer for this other than:

1. rebuild GTK+ and all other libraries that have plugins to use a prefix of /snap/myapp/current/ so they’ll have the correct search path without setting an environment variable.

2. modify the application to sanitise the environment before calling a subprocess. I’m not sure quite how you’d do this other than running something before desktop-launch to capture the pristine environment.

I don’t think there is an easy answer like using patchelf to modify rpaths.