14 DAY TRIAL // Just a few minutes ago, Canonical informed the Snappy Ubuntu community about the general availability of the Snapcraft 2.8 release in the default repositories of the Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) operating system.
As usual, Sergio Schvezov dropped the hot news on the Snappy mailing list, informing us about the new features introduced in the Snapcraft Snappy creator tool for Ubuntu Snappy Core, and soon for the Ubuntu Desktop and Server operating systems, as Canonical announced earlier this week.
New features in Snapcraft 2.8 include better detection of some of the steps that need to be executed for showing the current version of the snapraft.yaml file, support for using the "cleanbuild" command to make sure you have a clean build of your snaps, as well as support for Snappy's new interface, which is still work in progress.
Starting with Snapcraft 2.8, support for Snappy's "config" setting has been completely removed, and by popular request, the "geoip" feature has been disabled by default. Users can enable it in Snapcraft using the "--enable-geoip" flag via the command-line. More details should be found in today's announcement.
Installing Snapcraft 2.8 in Ubuntu
Snapcraft 2.8 is already available in the main software repositories of the upcoming Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) operating system, but it can also be installed on other supported Ubuntu Linux releases using the commands listed below, which you need to run in the Terminal application.
Please note that the third command is optional and should only be used if you also want to install the Snapcraft examples package. Of course, if you already have Snapcraft installed in your Ubuntu box, all you have to do to update to today's 2.8 release is to apply all the available updates from the official repos. Happy snapcrafting!
sudo apt update
sudo apt install snapcraft
sudo apt install snapcraft-examples