14 DAY TRIAL // Canonical released today the Snapcraft 2.38 tool that lets application developers package their Linux apps as Snaps for distribution across multiple Snappy-powered operating systems.
Announced just a few minutes ago by Sergio Schvezov, Snapcraft 2.38 will soon make its way into the stable software repositories of supported Ubuntu Linux releases, as well as other GNU/Linux distributions. The biggest change that landed in this new version is better support for classic Snaps, which will allow for true isolation for host's dynamically linked executables.
"Snapcraft now has a better architecture overall to handle classic Snaps, not only for those coming from parts that are built, but also for the case where prebuilt binaries are dumped into the Snap," writes Sergio Schvezov. "Prior to this version of Snapcraft, true isolation for a dynamically linked executable from the host was not possible. The work here makes sure that the correct interpreter is set and also sets up valid rpaths for the binary."
Introducing advanced grammar for strings, sunsetting host crawling
An advanced grammar functionality was present in Snapcraft for a while now, especially when we talk about the build- and stage packages, which lets packagers pick a different set of packages for each of the hardware architectures they support. In Snapcraft 2.38, Canonical introduces the grammar capabilities to the source keyboard, allowing devs to specify a different source for each Arch.
A demo of the advanced grammar for strings is available on the release announcement, which also notes the fact that Snapcraft will now alert users when the sunsetting host crawling feature comes into play, along with instruction on how to solve it and move forward, and it's capable of extracting appstream metadata like summary and description from individual parts. If you fancy compiling Snapcraft from sources, you can download the 2.38 tarball from GitHub.
Snapcraft is currently compatible with Ubuntu, Debian, Linux Mint, Arch Linux, Gentoo Linux, Fedora, Solus, OpenSuSE, Yocto, OpenWRT, and other GNU/Linux distros. You can visit the official website if you want to get started with packaging your apps for Canonical's Snap ecosystem. In related news, Canonical released this week the Snapd 2.30 Snappy daemon for Ubuntu and other supported OSes.