It now lets you create .NET 2.x based Snaps

Nov 18, 2017 19:58 GMT  ·  By

Two months in the works with more than 100 active contributors adding code to it, Canonical's Snapcraft Snap creator tool has been updated recently to version 2.35.

Snapcraft 2.35 comes approximately two months after the September release of Snapcraft 2.34, and it's a major update that finally adds support for the Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (Trusty Tahr) operating system series, which is maintained by Canonical for five years, until April 2019.

Ubuntu 14.04 LTS support in Snapcraft is particularly important for running Snaps based on ROS (Robot Operating System) Indigo, which is based on this LTS Ubuntu release. In addition, Snapcraft also appears to have received support for the Solus Linux-based operating system.

"Snapcraft currently only really runs well on Ubuntu 16.04, but we're working on adding support for other releases and Linux distributions," said Sergio Schvezov in the release notes on GitHub. "This is the first release where you can use the Snapcraft snap on Ubuntu 14.04 (Trusty)."

Also added in the Snapcraft 2.35 release is a new "pack" command that replaces the use of the "snap <snap-dir>" command, a new "refresh" command that becomes available only when persistent build containers are enabled, as well as a new "edit-collaborators" command.

More information has been added to the build manifest, including the contents of lock files, info from the fingerprint of the container used for the build and uname, and the available Snaps and DEBs currently installed. A new persistent build containers feature has been implemented as well.

Introducing the dotnet and ruby plugins

Another interesting feature of the Snapcraft 2.35 release is a brand-new dotnet plugin that lets developers create .NET 2.x-based Snaps. The plugin was created by .NET developer at Microsoft Rakesh Singh, and while it currently only contains that runtime, it uses a pretty straightforward syntax.

Written by James Beedy, Snapcraft 2.35 also comes with a ruby plugin that lets you build Ruby-based Snaps. The plugin currently supports various Ruby versions and it's capable of building them from source. Lastly, the catkin plugin was updated in this release to support resolving of pip dependencies.

Snapcraft 2.35 is available for download as source tarball right now from GitHub, but it should soon be available from the stable software repositories of all supported GNU/Linux distributions, including Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, OpenSuSE, Arch Linux, Gentoo, Linux Mint, Solus, OpenEmbedded, Yocto, OpenWrt, and others.