Simple trick to reduce size and startup time of GNOME-based snaps

snapcraft
9

What I was thinking of was something like this:

  1. the snap being built has a plug definition like the following in its snapcraft.yaml:

    plugs:
  gnome-3-28-1804:
    default-provider: gnome-3-28-1804
    interface: content
    target: $SNAP/gnome-platform

  2. Similar to how Snapcraft downloads the base snap for the project, it would then download the snap referenced by the default-provider key.

  3. Read meta/snap.yaml from that snap to find the corresponding slot. In this case:

    slots:
  gnome-3-28-1804:
    interface: content
    read:
    - /

  4. If the content provided by the slot is $SNAP relative (i.e. it isn’t sharing modifiable data from $SNAP_DATA/$SNAP_COMMON), scan the relevant subtree(s) from the snap looking for ELF libraries.

This is all declarative configuration, and available right now. While it is possible that the snap’s launch scripts might not set LD_LIBRARY_PATH correctly and not find libraries in the runtime snap, I think it is okay to treat that as an error on the part of the snap’s author that they will want to fix.

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