Big thanks to @lucyllewy for transitioning to the corebird name in the store and congratulations on creating a multi part source snap to overcome several outdated libraries in the Xenial archive that prevent a current Corebird from building
Really nice work and a great example of how the community snapcrafters can help promote snaps, assist upstreams and the Snapcraft developer advocacy team. Thank you @lucyllewy!
ps - I hear @lucyllewy is trying to get the upstream docs update to include snap install instructions too
This was a monumental effort, with hurdles at every turn. First I tried doing everything myself by including parts for every dependency, but a lot of them failed to link or compile against the others. In the end I found jhbuild and a snapcraft plugin that someone else had written but needed refreshing. With the jhbuild process everything started to fall into place.
You’ll note also, that Corebird tries to play videos if you click on them. This requires an h264 decoder, which is patent encumbered and requires license fees. So how do they work?? Well Cisco released an open source project and binaries compiled from that code called OpenH264. Now this wouldn’t ordinarily be any better than other open source decoders, except that Cisco are kindly paying for all the license fees of every binary version downloaded from them, which is used in Firefox among others. So the Corebird snap will download the binary upon first launch and voila you can now play the videos without worrying about breaking the copyright laws .
One caveat with this snap is that in order to receive the “pin” to login to twitter you need the apt package called snapd-xdg-open installed. I hear this is eventually going to be rolled into snapd itself, but for now is a required separate install.
From what I can tell, this is because I haven’t installed any themes into the snap. I am loathed to do that because I cannot account for every variation and in trying to do so I will be bloating the snap to proportions only ever dreamt of by astrophysicists
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