Prologue
snapcraft as a snap has been a beast living on the edge for a while now. With the tagging of 2.29.1 we are more confident in bringing it to the masses as we are now also have a suite of spread tests to test the snap.
While the deb of snapcraft will still be SRUed, snapcraft as a snap brings in a faster iteration cycle when it comes to reaching our users and an additional benefit of being able to snap revert if a fresh revision is not cutting it.
bodylogue
snapcraft has been released to the beta status undergoing a series of tests while it lived only on edge before the trigger was pulled. The channel map is as follows:
snapcraft.cli status snapcraft
Track Arch Channel Version Revision
latest amd64 stable - -
candidate - -
beta 2.29.1 99
edge 2.29.1 99
arm64 stable - -
candidate - -
beta 2.29.1 97
edge 2.29.1 97
armhf stable - -
candidate - -
beta 2.29.1 98
edge 2.29.1 98
i386 stable - -
candidate - -
beta 2.29.1 96
edge 2.29.1 96
As you can see, it is not only for amd64. If you have availability of compute or time to run on other architectures, that feedback would be mostly welcome. The objective is to have a release on candidate for wider testing and availability (if nothing is found from this same snap, if not in the form of a 2.29.x version).
We are currently looking for volunteers who want to go on with the regular snapcraft workflow but use the snap for snapcraft instead of the apt install of it.
Container (lxd)
If you have lxd setup already, installed snaps on instances before and want to try there, these are the necessary steps to get it going:
lxc launch ubuntu:xenial snapcraft-test
lxc exec snapcraft-test -- apt update
lxc exec snapcraft-test -- apt dist-upgrade --yes
lxc exec snapcraft-test -- apt install squashfuse --yes
lxc exec snapcraft-test -- snap install snapcraft --beta --classic
After this you can create yourself a user and access the container and work as usual when working with lxd.
On host
If you have snapcraft installed as a deb, removing it would provide a more real experience, to do so run:
sudo apt autoremove snapcraft
Then install snapcraft from the store:
sudo snap install snapcraft --beta --classic
Epilogue
We would appreciate any feedback or observation that occurs when running from the snap and not from the deb. General problems are also welcome, just try to make sure it is not reported already on https://bugs.launchpad.net/snapcraft
A simple comment on this forum post would be enough to trigger a fix on our side.
Please try on your distro/series of choice and don’t be shy of reporting those too!
excited to try it out
excellent idea!
(Either that or