Call for testing: Snapcraft 8.7.0

snapcraft
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Snapcraft 8.7.0 is in the latest/candidate and 8.x/candidate channels. The tentative release date is 2025-03-03T06:00:00Z.

Highlights include:

  • Improvements to the remote builder’s --build-for option
  • An improved and automated bash completion script
  • Support for confdbs

We’ve also switched from a changelog to release notes for better readability and presentation. So, for more information on 8.7, check out the release notes.

If you have any feedback or issues, please report them here or create an issue.

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Very swanky Release Notes!

What I do think is a bit unfortunate documentation wise relates to the registries feature and similar to it, which admittedly is part snapcraft part snapd; but I can see in the notes above it’s “confdb” now.

Despite seeing it in the release notes for months as it’s maturing, I honestly haven’t a clue what it’s intended for. Presumably it’s for enabling new stuff that didn’t work before, but, if there was one thing I’d improve now there’s a separate presentation of the Release Notes and they’re not raw changelogs themselves; I’d try to include a section explains the need for the feature or where it’s helpful. Currently all I know is they exist in some form and being outside Canonical itself, I’m otherwise clueless on what’s presumably something key long term. Neither project really explains to the users (as in, the developers) what these actually do unless you happen to already know.

It doesn’t need to be massive documentation, but something like “confdb functionally allows separately packaged snaps to share configuration data, such as API keys, secrets, or other state, and access each others config securely” (which might be entirely wrong, but the point is, it only needs to be a quick one so people can decide whether it might be worth looking further into for themselves)

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This is good feedback, thanks @James-Carroll. confdb is still being developed and the snapd team is going to publish documentation when it’s ready for usage, so I don’t have any documentation to point to.

Compared to the changelog, the release notes allow us to provide context and briefly explain features. So I agree that a sentence or two would go a long ways in helping - I’ll try to do that in the 8.7.1 update.

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Nice! Swanky release notes indeed. New remote build didn’t quite do the thing for me

I used:

snapcraft remote-build --launchpad-accept-public-upload --verbose --build-for arm64

But got an error: Ubuntu Pastebin

For mattermost-desktop at GitHub - snapcrafters/mattermost-desktop: A community-maintained package to easily install Mattermost Desktop on Linux

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Oh no!

I’m believe Launchpad doesn’t support shorthand notation and specifying an architecture. I recall reproducing this directly on launchpad - I’m trying to reproduce it again.

--build-for works for me using the extended notation:

platforms:
  amd64:
    build-on: [amd64]
    build-for: [amd64]
  arm64:
    build-on: [arm64]
    build-for: [arm64]
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Yep, I can reproduce this directly in Launchpad:

Error

image
image1567×1520 304 KB

Recipe

image
image1543×994 161 KB

snapcraft.yaml

image
image1026×915 117 KB

This should be a non-issue once Launchpad uses craft-platforms, but in the interim I filed a bug.

I’m wondering if I should warn or error when using shorthand architectures + --build-for.

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Yeh, I think it would be useful to avoid people debugging unnecessarily :slight_smile:

Do you know any timeline for LP adopting the craft-platforms stuff?

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We have developed a plan to adopt craft-platforms in Launchpad, and while we intend to implement it later this cycle, we don’t have a concrete timeline yet. I can follow up as our plans progress.

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Thanks @alvarocs, I’ll try to add a warning in Snapcraft in the interim (#5270).