Snap package for hamster

Created by: extraymond

Hi! Guys, I'm trying to build hamster in snap right now, I believe I'm half way there.

Motivation

My motivation for doing so is as follows:

1. Snap is a great way to maintain stable run-time environment so app will continue to work regardless of distro versions. It support various build systems too, waf is automatically handled.
2. Snaps have some nice update mechanisms, we can easily switch between channels as desired. It have some safety mechanisms that perform auto rollback when newer version crashed.
3. Combining the two, I think it might give hamster a greater chance to reach it's audience.

So here I am trying to reach out and see if anything clicks.

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Problems

However there are some problems regarding invoking services with dbus.

For the manual build version, the hamster launch file with automatically invoke the hamster-service and hamster-windows-service if it's not started, but on the snap service I can't find a way to do so. So currently I have to manually start the two service before launching the GUI. Which works!

I would really appreciate any help regarding to setup dbus service so that it can be invoked by dbus name.

Here's the snapcraft.yaml if anyone is interested:

name: hamster-snap # you probably want to 'snapcraft register <name>'
base: core18 # the base snap is the execution environment for this snap
version: "0.1" # just for humans, typically '1.2+git' or '1.3.2'
summary: snap for project hamster # 79 char long summary
description: |
  First attempt for creating a snap for project hamster.

grade: devel # must be 'stable' to release into candidate/stable channels
confinement: devmode # use 'strict' once you have the right plugs and slots

slots:
  dbus-hamster:
    interface: dbus
    bus: session
    name: org.gnome.Hamster

plugs:
  gnome-3-28-1804:
    interface: content
    target: $SNAP/gnome-platform
    default-provider: gnome-3-28-1804
  gtk-3-themes:
    interface: content
    target: $SNAP/data-dir/themes
    default-provider: gtk-common-themes
  icon-themes:
    interface: content
    target: $SNAP/data-dir/icons
    default-provider: gtk-common-themes
  sound-themes:
    interface: content
    target: $SNAP/data-dir/sounds
    default-provider: gtk-common-themes

apps:
  hamster-service:
    command: desktop-launch ${SNAP}/usr/lib/hamster-time-tracker/hamster-service
    plugs:
      - desktop
      - desktop-legacy
      - gsettings
      - home
    environment:
      PYTHONPATH: $SNAP/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages
  hamster-windows-service:
    command: desktop-launch ${SNAP}/usr/lib/hamster-time-tracker/hamster-windows-service
    plugs:
      - desktop
      - desktop-legacy
      - gsettings
      - home
    environment:
      PYTHONPATH: $SNAP/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages
  hamster:
    command: desktop-launch ${SNAP}/usr/bin/hamster
    desktop: usr/share/applications/hamster-time-tracker.desktop
    plugs:
      - desktop
      - desktop-legacy
      - gsettings
      - home
      - unity7
    environment:
      PYTHONPATH: $SNAP/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages
      LD_LIBRARY_PATH: $LD_LIBRARY_PATH:$SNAP/usr/share/hamster-time-tracker

parts:
  desktop-gnome-platform:
    source: https://github.com/ubuntu/snapcraft-desktop-helpers.git
    source-subdir: gtk
    plugin: make
    make-parameters: ["FLAVOR=gtk3"]
    build-packages:
      - build-essential
      - libgtk-3-dev
    override-build: |
      snapcraftctl build
      mkdir -pv $SNAPCRAFT_PART_INSTALL/gnome-platform
  hamster:
    # See 'snapcraft plugins'
    after: [desktop-gnome-platform]
    build-packages:
      - gettext
      - intltool
      - python-gconf
      - gconf2
    stage-packages:
      - gir1.2-gconf-2.0
      - python3-gi-cairo
      - python3-dbus
      - python3-gi
      - python3-xdg
    source: snap/src
    plugin: waf
    configflags:
      - --prefix=/usr