newnode desktop cannot exec wget

[flyinhome]

repeat by:

snap start newnode_desktop
sleep 5 # wait a bit
https_proxy=http://localhost:8006 wget https://cnn.com

from /var/log/syslog:

Jul 15 17:17:07 wrath newnode-vpn-desktop.nn-vpn-proxy[2231177]: https: https://stats.newnode.com/collect?v=1&tid=UA-149896478-2&t=event&ec=byte_counts&ds=app&ni=1&ea=peer&el=cnn.com&ev=11352&dh=cnn.com&an=client&aid=com.newnode.client
Jul 15 17:17:07 wrath newnode-vpn-desktop.nn-vpn-proxy[2231177]: https_wget: wget https://stats.newnode.com/collect?v=1&tid=UA-149896478-2&t=event&ec=byte_counts&ds=app&ni=1&ea=peer&el=cnn.com&ev=11352&dh=cnn.com&an=client&aid=com.newnode.client -o /dev/null -O /dev/null -T 15
Jul 15 17:17:07 wrath newnode-vpn-desktop.nn-vpn-proxy[2231177]: started wget on pid:2307223 sp:0x12c3500
Jul 15 17:17:07 wrath newnode-vpn-desktop.nn-vpn-proxy[2231177]: do_https (https://stats.newnode.com/collect?v=1&tid=UA-149896478-2&t=event&ec=byte_counts&ds=app&ni=1&ea=peer&el=cnn.com&ev=11352&dh=cnn.com&an=client&aid=com.newnode.client) returning 0x6da4c
Jul 15 17:17:07 wrath newnode-vpn-desktop.nn-vpn-proxy[2307223]: spawn: pid 2307223: cannot exec /root/parts/nn-vpn-proxy/install/usr/bin/wget: No such file or directory

[flyinhome]

I've tried a few things to fix. One problem is that the snap runs in a container that doesn't have access to the entire file system. Another problem is that the location of the wget executable won't be consistent from one version of Linux to another.

[flyinhome]

(logging things I've done to try to fix this here...)

I've tried installing the wget-snap snap and having the NN VPN client execute that executable instead of /usr/bin/wget, but I'm seeing at least two failures from that:

1. often there's already a version of client running that is already bound to port 8006 (even if I stop the snap before starting it);
2. when the client fails, there's an error message "invalid path to external symbolizer"

[flyinhome]

(another update)

I've tried a couple of variations of having this snap treat the wget apt package as a dependency. Problem is, when I do this the shared libraries needed to run wget don't get added to the container that the snap runs in, so the wget executable fails when client tries to exec it. I consider this a bug in snap/snapcraft.

I'm currently looking into writing a https_libevent.c module that would replace https_wget.c. This would avoid the need to fork and exec wget ,and it appears that the new code would be considerably simpler than the old code.