Fixing a Snapcraft Build that had been Broken for Two Years

Two years ago, I embarked on a project to repair a broken Snapcraft build for Packet Sender. Snapcraft is an all-in-one build system, dependency manager, and packager. While it simplifies the process, it can also present challenges. When attempting to run Packet Sender, it would crash with an error message indicating that the shared library libpxbackend-1.0.so could not be found.

As someone who grew up in the Microsoft era, I was already familiar with .dll files, which serve a similar purpose to shared libraries in *nix systems. However, Microsoft's implementation was flawed, leading to the development of shared libraries in Unix-like systems. The error message pointed to the fact that the library was expected to be in a specific location, but it was not.

Initially, I tried hardcoding paths or modifying the Qt library version, but these attempts were unsuccessful. Then, I utilized Grok, a tool that guided me towards the libproxy1v5 library and the addition of an LD_LIBRARY_PATH environment variable. Regrettably, this solution did not resolve the issue.

A breakthrough came when Dan Nagle suggested using the kde-neon-6 Snapcraft plugin. This extension provides a fully configured Qt 6 stack, which correctly stages shared libraries, including the missing libpxbackend-1.0.so. Consequently, I could eliminate many stage-packages and build-packages, and convert the build system to CMake, a more modern and preferred build system in KDE.

The executable size shrank dramatically, from 165MB to just under 6MB, due to the bundled Qt 6 libraries. Additionally, the build process was expanded to support both amd64 and arm64 architectures, enabling Packet Sender to run on Raspberry Pi hardware.