14 DAY TRIAL // Canonical's Sergio Schvezov had the great pleasure of announcing the release of Snapcraft 2.24, the latest stable version of the tool application developers can use for packaging their apps as Snaps, a universal binary format for Linux OSes.
Snapcraft 2.24 arrives approximately two weeks after the 2.23 milestone, and it looks like it's yet another big release that adds many cool new features, especially those that have been implemented in the 2.19 build of the Snapd Snappy daemon, such as classic confinement support and the ability to build classic Snaps.
The pluginhandler component received some attention in Snapcraft 2.24, adding prepare, build, and install scriptlet support, along with support for in-snap libraries instead of using the system ones. Moreover, the get_build_properties() function was implemented in the Maven, Gradle, CMake, WAF, and SCons plugins.
Snapcraft supports download and validate of packages on branded stores
Among other noteworthy features added in the Snapcraft 2.24 release, we can mention the implementation of the "[list-]registered" command for listing registered Snaps, idempotent store installs for tests, support for downloading and validating packages on branded stores, and unittests improvements for the ARMhf hardware architecture.
It also looks like many of the supported sources have been refactored into modules, including Bazaar, DEB, Local, Git, Base, Mercurial, RPM, Tar, Subversion, ZIP, and Script. A more stable FTP source is now used for tests, "aliases" support was added to "apps," and the parser now uses the same version method as "snapcraft."
Last but not least, testtools are now being used as the base of all unit tests, origin-{branch,commit,tag} support was added to the parser, the Rust plugin has been updated to fetch dependencies in pull, a source value was implemented to the error message, and plugins can now be an alias of list-plugins.
Snapcraft will no longer force the architecture for the Tomcat demo, and it looks like a PermissionError was addressed in the file_utils component when attempting to replace the contents of a read-only file. Snapcraft 2.24 is now live in the stable repositories of the Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) and Ubuntu 16.10 (Yakkety Yak) operating systems.