14 DAY TRIAL // Canonical, through David Callé, has had the great pleasure of announcing new maintenance releases of the Snappy tools Snapcraft and Snapd, which bring new features and several enhancements.
Both Snapcraft 2.13 and Snapd 2.11 are now available in the main software repositories of the Ubuntu 16.04.1 LTS (Xenial Xerus) operating system, and according to the announcement, Snapd 2.11 introduces new commands, namely, buy, try, find private, disable, refresh, and revert.
These new commands let users buy various applications that are being distributed in the Snappy Store as Snaps for Ubuntu and other GNU/Linux distributions that support the latest Snappy technologies. They also allow you to find private Snaps, disable installed Snaps, as well as (finally) downgrade any Snap package you might have installed on your OS.
"When logged into a store, 'snap find --private' lets you see snaps that have been shared with you privately," says David Callé in the announcement. "The new buy command presents you a choice of payment backends for non-free snaps. 'snap disable' allows you to disable specific snaps. "snap revert" allows you to revert a snap to its previous installed version."
On the other hand, the "refresh" command has also been improved to work with Snaps that are installed in devmode. What's more, it looks like the "snap try" command broke particular Snaps when the user attempted to delete a mounted folder that contained a Snap tree as an installed Snap without removing the Snap first. This has been fixed as well, and a "broken" tag will be displayed next to the broken Snap when running the "snap list" command.
Interfaces changes, Snapcraft 2.13's new features
Besides the new commands listed above, Snapd 2.11 also introduces various changes to the interfaces, such as getsockopt, which now supports X11 plugs, and the hardware-observe interface has been introduced to allows Snaps to read the hardware information directly from the host system. Additionally, /usr/bin/locale access has been made part of the default Snap confinement policy.
Release highlights of Snapcraft 2.13 include improvements to the Ubuntu Store integration thanks to the addition of the "snapcraft push" and "snapcraft release" commands, a brand new plugin called plainbox that has been designed from the ground up to allows certain parts that contain a Plainbox test collection, multiple enhancements to sanitizing cloud parts declarations, the addition of the "gradle" Java plugin, along with improvements to the "ant" and "maven" plugins.