Snapping an Ubuntu 18.04 apt package?

snapcraft
1

Hi!

As we all know Ubuntu 18.04 is by far the most popular base to build desktop distros for, and that’s great in some ways and less great in others. I for example am using Manjaro because I’m not hardcore enough for Arch, but i like the rolling release model of being kinda up2date with everything as much as possible, and the Manjaro team does a great job.

Anyways, this obviously brings problems with some applications that aren’t packaged for archlinux/manjaro. Sure there’s the AUR but the specific application I’m interested in doesn’t build from AUR and I was thinking i should package it up in a snap and use the snap store (great job building snap guys). (Also it was quite a complex build so i was hoping to skip it completely)

So the application i wanna package is monodevelop, i looked at the Geekbench4 example and was thinking there must be some way to specify APT dependencies and then just simply specify the command to run (monodevelop4).

I’ve been looking through the documentation (And searched elsewhere), which i didn’t understand (that’s why I’m here and there’s no Monodevelop in the Snap Store :stuck_out_tongue:)

Could someone shed some light into this? No need for the full shebang, but some pointers would be nice. (My understanding is that one would use the Ubuntu base as a snap dependency and build on top of that somehow).

Thanks in advance, and thanks for making this awesome project, I hope and believe Snap can get us closer to “year of the Linux desktop”! :slight_smile:

2

I have an experimental version of this very application as a snap. However the build is dependent on a couple of pull requests landing in snapcraft before I can get it all working. So come back in a couple of weeks and we can re-visit it.

3

Well that’s a lucky concidence, thanks! :slight_smile: But it still leaves the original question open, is there some simple way to package APT packages into Snap (Not a complex example like MonoDevelop, but maybe something simpler like CMake-gui) (i know it’s already packaged, but i couldn’t really come up with a better example).

Thanks for the quick response and again the great work :slight_smile:

4

Yes, but the pull request hasn’t landed yet. Once it does, we’ll write about it. :slight_smile:

5

Ah, I wrongly assumed you were working on packaging it from src and it needed something special anyways. Thanks for clarifying :slight_smile:

6

How did things work out with the PRs getting merged? :slight_smile:

7

It’s blocked on some changes in snapcraft. Once they land, we’ll look at it again.

8

ping? still blocked?