"mir" and "unity8" snap interfaces are not available

[Alberto Mardegan]

Not sure whether this is a bug in unity8-desktop-session or snapd, please move as necessary.

At the moment, it's impossible to run a snap using Mir (unless it's installed in devmode), because there's no snap providing the "mir" interface.
Either unity8-desktop-session or the core snap should somehow provide this interface.

[Michael Terry (mterry)]

The unity8-session snap does provide that interface. But it is not installed by default.

Agreed that since the unity8-desktop-session deb provides the Mir socket, it would be nice if it could expose that fact to the snappy world by providing a "mir" slot.

[Pat McGowan (pat-mcgowan)]

From a recent email thread

On a snap based system, mir-libs snap will provide the content interface to access the libraries. Both client and server bits reside there.

This is largely done. mir-libs has been updated to match zesty's version (0.26.1) and several apps and the unity8-session snap itself are now using it. The desktop-launch helper script uses mir-libs if it is connected.
The snapd content interface for mir-libs is not autoconnected yet. But that is mitigated by the fact that any canonical-owned app will autoconnect and the unity8-snap-install script will also manually connect the core apps. In future, once we are more comfortable with the mir-libs snap and think the libraries are ready for wide use, we can ask the snapd team to turn on autoconnection.

Ubuntu-app-platform will no longer include the mir client library.

This is still to be published

On a classic system, we need an implicit mir interface so that confined snaps can use mir as provided by debs in the base system.

This needs work.

[Alberto Mardegan (mardy)]

Workaround, based on Michael's comment and guidance over IRC:

1) install the unity8-session snap
2) remove the unity8-session-snap debian package, if you have it installed
3) if you have already some unity8 apps installed as a snap, connect their "mir" interface manually