It adds support for 7-zip files, many improvements

May 23, 2017 23:17 GMT  ·  By

Canonical's Sergio Schvezov was proud to announce the release and immediate availability of Snapcraft 2.30, a major milestone of the open-source Snappy packaging tool used to package apps in the Snap universal binary format.

Snapcraft 2.30 comes more than a month after the Snapcraft 2.29 release and is here to add a highly requested change, namely the refactoring of the command-line interface (CLI) to offer a much cleaner UI to newcomers, but without breaking backward compatibility.

While support for assigned containers per project in Snapcraft remains hidden by the feature flag, requiring users to set the SNAPCRAFT_CONTAINER_BUILDS environment variable if they want to enable it, it's been extended in this new release to work with all of the Snapcraft build commands.

"cleanbuild now correctly works when using the :arch syntax in build-packages and stage-packages, this is for example, having a stage-packages entry that ends with :i386 when cleanbuilding on amd64," explains Sergio Schvezov, Software Engineer at Canonical, in the release announcement.

Asset recording, support for 7-Zip files, new meson plugin

Among other cool changes implemented in Snapcraft 2.30, we can mention support for 7-zip (.7z) files for sources (you need to set the "source-type" variable to 7z for this to work), and it looks like the snap collaboration UI is now complete, but remains hidden in APIs until the Snappy Store enables the feature.

Additionally, Snapcraft is now capable of displaying branch information for the appropriate commands, the rust plugin was updated to work correctly when the "source-subdir" variable is set, and work on the asset recording feature continues to make it easier to track what's inside a Snap or to rebuild the same Snap.

Last but not least, a new meson plugin landed in Snapcraft 2.30 to add support for the Meson build system (run the "snapcraft help meson" command to see how to use the plugin), and the kernel plugin received a "kconfigflavor" property to support standard Ubuntu kernel configurations when assembling a kernel config.

Snapcraft 2.30 will soon make its way into the main software repositories of your favorite Ubuntu Linux distribution, but you can also download the source tarball right now from the project's GitHub page, where you'll find all the information you need to get started packaging your apps as Snaps for Ubuntu or other supported OS.