14 DAY TRIAL // The development of Snapcraft, the handy Ubuntu utility that lets you create Snaps for your applications, which you can now distribute across multiple operating systems, is advancing at a fast pace, and it looks like Snapcraft 2.12 will land soon.
In his latest blog post, Sergio Schvezov, one of Snapcraft's core developers, shares with the Snappy community some of the hottest features coming to the Snapcraft 2.12 release in the next few days. Among these is the ability to access the parts ecosystem, for which the developer has published a lot of useful examples.
"So imagine I am someone wanting to use libcurl. Normally I would write the part definition from scratch and be on with my own business but surely I might be missing out on something about optimal switches used to configure the package or even build it. I would also need to research on how to use the specific plugin required," says Schvezov.
To get an overview of how to use remote parts when working with the Snapcraft tool to build Snaps for various applications, we recommend reading Mr. Schvezov's in-depth blog post in full. Still, please try to keep in mind that if you want to be able to reproduce those examples, you will first need to have Snapcraft 2.12 installed, which hasn't yet landed for Ubuntu 16.04 LTS.
How to enjoy the latest Snapcraft release in Ubuntu Linux
At the moment of writing this story, the latest Snapcraft release is 2.11, but version 2.12 is being prepared as we speak, and it is only a matter of time until it lands in the main software repositories of the Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) operating system. So, to enjoy the latest Snapcraft release, please execute the following commands.
sudo apt update
sudo apt install snapcraft
If you're just starting with Snapcraft and you also want to install the Snapcraft examples, you'll have to run the next command as well. Please note that Snapcraft 2.12 has not yet landed, so you'll need to monitor the repositories in the coming days to get the update. There are numerous other changes in Snapcraft 2.12.
sudo apt install snapcraft-examples
snapcraft 2.12 brings the new Parts Ecosystem. Here's what @sergiusens, one of Snapcraft's core devs has to say: https://t.co/sVEv6d3i4M — snapcraft (@snapcraftio) June 28, 2016