14 DAY TRIAL // Canonical has released Snapcraft 3.8, a new feature and maintenance update of their in-house built tool for packaging Linux apps in the Snap universal binary format.
Made for Ubuntu, but also available on the software repositories of various other popular GNU/Linux distributions, the Snapcraft tool lets application developers easily distribute their apps across multiple operating systems by packaging them in the Snap universal and containerized binary format.
These days, Snaps are being packaged and published by some of the major tech companies, such as Microsoft, Google, Mozilla, Spotify, and others, to make it easier for users to install cross-platforms apps on their GNU/Linux distributions. That's why Canonical decided to make a Windows installer for Snapcraft.
"Support for a Windows installer has been fully fleshed out and ready to be delivered, this means that Snapcraft will soon be able to run natively from Windows," Sergio Schvezov, Software Engineer at Canonical. The Windows installer will allow developers to package their apps as Snaps on Windows 10.
What's new in Snapcraft 3.8
The Snapcraft 3.8 release comes with some goodies for those who are already using the tool, such as support for using the build-bases keyword together with the kernel and snapd snap types, support for the GNOME 3.28 desktop environment via a new extension, as well as a new syntax to ignore packages.
Parallel building hints have been enforced in both the colcon and catkin plugins, and the rust plugin received support for properly and natively building on the s390x architecture. Snapcraft 3.8 also brings support for building inside Podman containers, as well as numerous other smaller fixes.
The full changelog is available on GitHub, from where you can also download Snapcraft 3.8's source code if you're compiling it yourself. Otherwise, we recommend updating your installations to Snapcraft 3.8 via the stable software repositories of your favorite GNU/Linux distribution.