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oSoMoN

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Posts posted by oSoMoN

  1. Hi @Stan`

    I understand the developers' time is limited and precious, and is better spent improving the game.

    I suggest making you (or someone trustworthy on the development team) a collaborator of the snap. This is a feature of the snap store that will give you permission to administer the 0AD snap, while I retain ownership (and I'll continue to update it). It will give you access to the dashboard with detailed metrics. There can be more than one collaborator. All that's needed is an e-mail address for each collaborator, feel free to contact me in private.

  2. A follow-up post to state that I regularly update the 0ad snap with the latest releases.

    The current version in the stable channel is 0.0.23b-alpha, while the edge channel has a fairly recent svn development snapshot.

    Maintaining the snap is a minimal amount of work (builds happen automatically on Launchpad) so I'm happy to continue doing so, however I'd like to highlight that one big advantage of transferring the ownership of the snap to Wildfire Games is that it would give the project control over the branded store page at https://snapcraft.io/0ad, and access to a dashboard with detailed metrics (versions, distributions, territories, weekly active installations).

    As a quick glimpse of what this looks like, here is a screenshot showing active installations per version over the past two years:

    0ad-metrics.thumb.png.cdba835e0f97134bf9cf62ec0d419c87.png

     

    As you can see, there are currently more than 4K users of the snap, and whenever an update is available the way snapd automatically installs it ensures that players will always be on the latest version. And the snap is being used on 19 different linux distributions (snapd currently supports more than 100 of them). 

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  3. I pushed a change to the snap package to get the desktop file from the source tarball, instead of a hardcoded, old version. This ensures the MimeType=application/x-pyromod+zip association is there and generates the corresponding mimeinfo.cache entry when snapd installs the snap.

    This, however, is not enough. The host system also needs to be made aware of the new mime type (need to run update-mime-database with the pyrogenesis.xml file). As far as I can tell snapd doesn't provide such a feature yet, but I have asked about it on the snapcraft forum.

     

    Please note that the name of the snap has changed from play0ad to 0ad (the previous name was a consequence of a limitation in snapd that didn't allow names starting with a digit, but this was fixed since then). Also note that the process-control interface doesn't need to be manually connected any longer.

    In summary, to install and run, just do:

    snap install 0ad
    0ad

    This will get you the latest official release. If you feel adventurous and want to try the latest changes in the development repository, use the edge channel:

    snap install 0ad --edge

     

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  4. 10 hours ago, leper said:

    Not new, rather decades old.

    New as in "unlike what traditional linux distros do", not new as in "just been invented", of course :)

     

    10 hours ago, leper said:

    have to rely on whoever created that bundle to provide security updates

    Indeed with snaps the responsibility of providing security updates falls on the packager.

    Thankfully 0ad has an active community of packagers for major linux distros, but many software vendors don’t have that, and they want to be in control of the versions of the deps their software will run against.

     

    One considerable advantage of snaps is that they run fully confined by default, so even if using old libs with known vulnerabilities, the damage they can do the host system is very limited.

  5. 2 hours ago, leper said:

    Moved this out of the announcements forum to a better place (as that one should be about WFG announcments, I'm sligthly surprised that you could start a topic there).

    Sorry I posted that in the wrong place, and thanks for fixing it.

     

    2 hours ago, leper said:

    We do provide a ppa, that provides updated versions of the game for Ubuntu versions and doesn't have the shortcomings of emulating static libraries.

    Right, snaps embed all their dependencies, not relying on system-wide shared libs. Much like a windows or java application would do. That’s a new paradigm for people used to the traditional linux distribution model. There are pros and cons, and I’m not saying this should replace the PPA (which is what I used to use). Rather, this is (hopefully) a way of reaching more gamers :)

  6. Hi everyone,

    Ever heard of snaps as a new packaging format? If you haven't, information available at http://snapcraft.io/.

    I packaged 0ad as a snap, it is now available in the Ubuntu app store for amd64 and i386.

    Official announcement on the snapcraft mailing list: https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/snapcraft/2017-January/002486.html.

     

    Note that the package is registered under my user in the ubuntu app store, but I’m happy to hand it over to the development team if this is something you're interested in maintaining.

     

    For anyone interested in the packaging details, the code lives here: https://code.launchpad.net/~osomon/+junk/0ad-snap.

     

    Feedback welcome, and keep up the awesome work on 0ad, my favourite game by far.

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