Road to core24

Snapcraft 8, recently released to stable (as mentioned in Call for testing: Snapcraft 8.0.0) allows targeting core24 properly. The syntax today requires the following construct:

base: core24
build-base: devel

This forces the resulting snap to have a grade of devel. In essence this means that a snap build with the devel build-base cannot be released to stable or candidate channels. The reason for this is simple, this snap cannot be guaranteed to work on the yet to be stable core24 base. Additionally, there are changes in Snapcraft itself that can take place until this time, so far no changes are anticipated, but there might be some due to integration issues with core24.

There is a timeline in place, that aligns with that of Ubuntu defined at Noble Numbat Release Schedule - Release - Ubuntu Community Hub. At most at feature freeze, currently defined there to be 2024-02-29T03:00:00Z Snapcraft will have a release on the beta channel which would no longer require the build-base key to be defined. Making it so, so that snaps built with that version of Snapcraft to be of grade stable.

On the day of Beta Freeze of Ubuntu, marked to be 2024-04-01T00:00:00Z the version of Snapcraft on the beta channel will migrate to the candidate channel.

On Ubuntu release day, the Snapcraft version in the candidate channel would have made it to stable.

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Would you encourage snappers starting new snaps today to target core24? I have some new HPC snaps that I am working on and I am wondering if it’s better for me to target core24 with plans to go stable in April rather than just start with core22. Is core24 stable enough to start building edge snaps?

I would say that core24 would be stable enough only when we reach Beta Freeze

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Thanks for this @sergiusens !

In light of some issues we’re having with Ubuntu 24.04 build images, we are delaying the beta channel release by 2 weeks until 2024-03-14T00:00:00Z.

We’ll be posting a full set of changes required to build core24 snaps soon.

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In the next few days, support for building core24 snaps with Snapcraft will be available on the latest/edge and latest/beta channels.

For developers who have been building core24 snaps already, please try building again! Changes and migration notes are described in (micro) Howto migrate to core24.

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As of today 8.1.0, currently on candidate, still requires build-base. Is there a revised timeline for this update?

Good question, we are targeting a release of snapcraft 8.2 this week, which will drop the build-base requirement for core24.

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Snapcraft 8.2.0 is now available in the beta channel. More details are available here:

Snapcraft 8.2.1 is now available in the candidate channels and is scheduled to be promoted to stable on 2024-04-29T05:00:00Z. More details available here: Call for testing: Snapcraft 8.2.1

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Snapcraft 8.2.1 has been released to latest/stable and 8.x/stable.

Again, more details are available here: Call for testing: Snapcraft 8.2.1

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