It's available now in the Ubuntu 17.04 repositories

Mar 24, 2017 19:59 GMT  ·  By

Canonical released today Snapcraft 2.28, a new maintenance update to the tool application developers can use to package their apps as Snaps for Ubuntu Linux and other distros that support the Snappy technologies.

Snapcraft 2.28 is here one and a half months after the release of Snapcraft 2.27, and it appears to have already landed in the stable repositories of Ubuntu 17.04 (Zesty Zapus), which we're currently using on our PCs at the moment of writing. According to the changelog attached below, a total of 55 changes are included in this update.

Prominent new features include support for packaging Snapcraft itself as a Snap, updated python, kernel, godeps, plainbox-provider, and catkin plugins with various improvements or bug fixes, implementation of an optional "source-checksum" property, as well as the enablement of delta uploads by default for the store.

Coming soon to Ubuntu 16.04 LTS and 16.10

The store got a lot of attention during the Snapcraft 2.28 development cycle, and it now features retries for store calls, the ability to set User-Agent header in store requests, and the addition of track support to commands. A lot of tests and repo enhancements are also present in this new maintenance release of the Snap creator tool.

Among some of the noteworthy ones, we can mention support for versioned stage-packages, implementation of version support for build-packages, support for passing the autopkgtest secret to the container, support for Bazaar branches and snap directory in external tests, and the ability to manually test the kernel snaps.

Last but not least, Snapcraft 2.28 adds ROS (Robot Operating System) content sharing demo and makes the ROS demos support exiting after success, updates the FTP source for integration tests, makes the kernel unit tests to be independent of a hardware architecture, and removes the tomcat demo snap.

Snapcraft 2.28 also promises to allow developers to run individual autopkgtest suites, and it should be coming soon to both Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) and Ubuntu 16.10 (Yakkety Yak), so make sure that you update your installations on a regular basis to receive the newest software versions.

Snapcraft 2.28 Changelog