14 DAY TRIAL // Canonical's Snappy development team have released a new maintenance version of the Snapcraft 2.x tool that lets application developers package their apps as Snap packages for Ubuntu and other GNU/Linux distributions that support Snaps.
A Snap is a universal binary format that can be distributed across major Linux-based operating systems, including Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, Arch Linux, Gentoo Linux, OpenSuSE, as well as embedded Linux build systems like OpenEmbedded, OpenWRT, and Yocto, if support for Snappy technologies is present. Snapcraft can be used to create Snap packages.
Snapcraft 2.23 is here almost a month after the release of Snapcraft 2.22, which introduced support for building gadget Snaps and RPM as a source entry, and it looks like it's a consistent update that adds many exciting new features and improvements, starting with the implementation of the long anticipated FTP support for sources.
Snaps can now be downloaded from the Snappy Store without login
The Snapcraft 2.23 release also makes it possible for Snaps to be downloaded from the Snappy Store without login, improves the nodejs plugin by allowing it to be installed during pull to support npm run, and it adds TERM=dumb support to indicators, for which it improves Content-Encoding set support.
Also new in Snapcraft 2.23 is a script that lets you retry autopktests, initial support for deltas, which was recently implemented in the Snapd Snappy daemon to allow users to download the Snap packages on slow Internet connections, and last but not least, support for remote dependencies.
The command-line interface (CLI) of Snapcraft was improved as well with the basic implementation of 'enable-ci' functionality, support for _filedir to take an extension, not a glob, as well as the addition of the "enable-ci travis --refresh" command. Prune has been enabled for the "snap cache" command and the cmake plugin was updated.
There are many other minor, yet needed improvements in Snapcraft 2.23, so we recommend studying the full changelog attached below if you're curious to know what exactly was changed or added. In the meantime, you can install the new version on your Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) or Ubuntu 16.10 (Yakkety Yak) operating system.