Today, March 24, 2016, Sergio Schvezov of Canonical announced the release of Snapcraft 2.6 for the upcoming Ubuntu Snappy Core 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) operating system.
Snapcraft is the tool that users can use to create and manage snaps for Snappy Ubuntu Core. It is popularly known as the Snappy creator tool, and it ships preinstalled in Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, which launches later this spring, on April 21, 2016.
Today's release of Snapcraft comes only two days after Canonical announced Snapcraft 2.5 on March 22, a maintenance build that introduced experimental support for creating kernel snaps thanks to the implementation of the kernel and kbuild plugins.
There aren't many interesting features in Snapcraft 2.6, except for the fact that it offers better clean support that works per step of snap creation, i.e. pull, build, stage, and snap. Tracking of dependencies has been improved as well.
Another interesting feature is that the 'setup' function now supports static, non-declared assets like icons. Moreover, it's now possible to build OS snaps from a directory, the documentation has been updated, and testing improved.
Here's how to install Snapcraft 2.6 in Ubuntu
Again, please note that Snapcraft 2.6 is designed to work with the Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) operating system, but you can also install it on Ubuntu 15.10 (Wily Werewolf).
The latest version is now live in the main software repositories, and to install it or update from Snapcraft 2.5 or previous versions, you must execute the following set of commands in the Terminal app.
sudo apt update && sudo apt install snapcraft If you need the Snapcraft examples, you can install them too for your new Snapcraft 2.6 installation by running the command below in a terminal emulator. Happy Snapcrafting!
sudo apt install snapcraft-examples 